What you describe is what used to be considered sysadmin work. I too did quite a bit of it, but most of it went to people who specialized in those things. And no, I don't do any of it now. On any given day I'll probably deal with machines in at least a dozen geographic locations across two continents, and if I tried to enter any of them I'd be stopped at the door - no, at the gate before I even got to the buildings. Instead, I write code to interact with the deployment system and the provisioning system and the multiple monitoring systems and the automatic remediation system and so on. Is it better? It scales better, but as a matter of personal satisfaction and avoiding fury at other people's crappy code I think I'd rather be plugging in cables and configuring switches.
> I think because some of the hard stuff got a lot easier, the easier stuff got unnecessarily complex.
There's a lot of truth to that, and I don't think we necessarily disagree on the outcome. However we got here, whichever specific things make modern software development more unpleasant, it seems that it is more unpleasant than it used to be.