The role of SRE was derived at Google. It has an obvious overlap with DevOps, especially where it concerns automation and scaling to reduce waste and eliminate toil. Regardless of the differences or similarities, in the eyes of the c-suite, those insisting upon using 'Sysadmin' as a role, displays intransigence; which will only embolden recruiters to either low ball potentially more experienced candidates or sideline them in favour of those who are more willing to tailor their attitude to fit the new paradigm.

https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor/

Which is a similar mislabeling, right? I thought SREs were more about design for scalability.

They might prefer that, but it's misleading. "SRE" is closely associated with Google's approach, where SREs are supposed to spend the majority of their time writing high quality code. If you aren't doing that, you shouldn't call yourself an SRE.