You're looking at it from the SW dev angle, but DevOps is very interesting from the management angle too and you can leave stuff like K8s to some DevOps engineers after you've done your consulting.

I mean stuff like GitOps/trunk-based development, release management, feature management, monitoring, review apps (see on Gitlab), Git itself (still not universal) and so on.

I was a contractor for a few F500 and all of them had separate DevOps teams that we were supposed to interface with; we didn't even have access to the cloud console. But I was also a contractor for few large companies (but nowhere near F500) and we did all DevOps ourselves and had full access to the cloud panel.

Both models had DevOps consultants though - someone who advises the management on the best ways to do DevOps so each developer doesn't do it in their own way & so never-ending discussions about what's the best way are avoided (those didn't write a single line of code).

It’s totally possible. Aside from a stint “embedded” on an implementation team to launch a critical product, I’ve been doing exclusively exploration, architecture, devops, and documentation for the last two years or so.