OP seems to think SRE and DevOps are seen as lowly by management, yet those jobs still exist here, while the "real programmers" were offshored long ago. Good luck getting a job Actually Building Stuff, almost no one does it any more.
They are seen as unfortunate cost centers. They don't add new features that are sold to clients. They don't even fix the bugs the clients care about. Making the others more efficient or preventing catastrophe is invisible work.