First off, I think you should give yourself more credit as what you do has importance and you are valued.

> "Be a developer, or get out of the tech industry."

I don't agree with this. There are plenty of jobs in operations that require the skills you have (e.g. standing up servers and automating the heck out of things)

Writing code and creating software was one of the few things that really clicked for me, so I can't share advice on that. One thing I can say is that all of the operations work is where I feel myself spinning and getting nowhere, I push through when I have to, but I don't always have hours to spend debugging an environment--i leave that to someone who can solve the same issue in minutes.