We just live on a higher level of abstraction and have better tools & processes now.
For example, "developer" is considered offensive, because for some people it's very important to be called "software engineer".
Really good developers don't care about titles.
They don't have time to worry about such, or they have so much money / experience that even if you call them "smart monkeys" they'll be happy with it.
Same goes with sysadmins, SREs, devops, or whatever role you choose.
For some people they have shitty jobs: they don't have such recognition (whether for a good reason or not).
No recognition from work, no recognition from colleagues, no recognition financially, etc, that, if you remove them the title / prestige, obviously they would feel bad.
Source: my experience in a school calling itself "engineering school", and all other schools calling it a "place where to pee code"
That's about the money, not about being good at your work. Ask anyone on the street if you can call them a rat in exchange for a million dollar salary and they'll say yes. It's quite simple.
-shrug-. That's what I feel like in my org at least.
The two jobs are nothing alike, at all, whatsoever.
Sysadmins are support roles. Their functional role is to provide a healthy substrate to run the application layer on top of.
SREs work at the application layer itself. If the system can't scale due to internal architecture, an SRE would be expected to propose a new, scalable design. That would be in addition to maintaining the substrate.
To be clear, there is also nothing inferior about performing a support role. No org can succeed without support.
But the two roles are not the same, and if a job's set of responsibilities don't include shared ownership over application layer architecture, then it can be a great job but it's not an SRE role.
I think one of the key differences to highlight is that usually SREs are engaged early in the design process of new features, and are often driving their own feature changes to the product for reliability or scalability reasons. Those aren't responsibilities or expectations that I've really ever seen in the context of a sysadmin.
I think people like Evi Nemeth, Tom Limoncelli, Æleen Frisch or David Blank-Edelman would have been the equivalent of Distinguished Sysadmins at the time. But they weren't at startups. The places that needed that level were universities, research facilities, telecommunications companies, and the like.
I was fortunate to work under Geoff Halprin early in my career, who while not as well known as those names was a SAGE and USENIX board member and who definitely planted the "don't just do task, engineer yourself out of a job" seed in me.