Has anybody else noticed the same? Or am I way off base?
AWS is a mess. You learn just enough to get by and long for the days of simplicity where you could manage a bunch of servers yourself.
Oh, sorry, we are using Azure or GPC or OpenStack, that's an entirely new set of names for you to even know what you are looking for.
K8S is just the same. Every company decides on an "easier to use tool" like k9s that you have to learn from scratch if you don't want to jump through hoops to just use kubectl directly.
If anything is a definition of boring work, it's this: work to assemble a bunch of existing pieces without creating anything really new. I like being tasked with creating things, not being an assembly line worker who's got to learn terminology de jour.
That's the reality of DevOps - it's not primarily development, it's applying frameworks to infrastructure and deployment tasks. Get a senior sysadmin in operations and pay for a few courses in what you need from them.
DevOps is slightly more sophisticated system administration--janitorial work. With a much higher occurrence of vomit.