DevOps was/is not just better tools, it's the same team that builds the software, operates the software (and underlying infrastructure). Maybe when it became a job title (later) then it just became a rebranding of the ops team.
I would implore some reading into the origin.
Cliff notes version, things that happened around the same time:
* Dev+Ops days is made by Patrick Dubois, the intent was for Sysadmins to use Agile ("Agile Systems Administrator" was the desired job title), he used "dev"+"ops" to signify a unification in working methodology, not as a team
* 10+ deploys a day from Flickr; where the authors are in a single unified team of sysadmins and developers.
Like Agile, people always claim you're "doing it wrong", which I find ironic given that the portmanteau was created to bring Agile to systems administration itself. However, devops was confused right out of the gate.
Your definition is the 10+ deploys a day talk.
I actually wrote a blog post about this:
And failed. Other people’s jobs always look easy from the outside
What do we think we were using Perl for?
Job Security (joking)
The difference with those tools is that they were off the rack and not bespoke. There were plenty of bespoke systems before, used in fewer places because bespoke systems are expensive.
Now you pay AWS anywhere from 5-11x more for an instance, but you still have an ops team managing it (by some name).
If you had given even 20% of that investment to the sysadmins you would have had an equivalent system.
AWS just weaponised this short-sighted thinking that was killing ops teams.
From what I recall it was AWS developers trying to solve object storage, and EC2 came later. Not about ops.
Not happening in any of the companies I worked for as a contractor or subcontractor. In those companies at best dev teams have nowadays some additional capability to deploy to dev/test instantly (so they do their own CI/CD pipelines and manage dev infra via Terraform or whatever) but production is always handled by a "DevOps" team which does not touch the application code at all. This is especially visible in companies that outsource their development to software houses / individual contractors (B2B stuff, most of the folks I interact with).