It doesn’t mean anything for two reasons: companies have treated it as a catch—all, and there is a glut of people calling themselves SREs who have never operated a server that wasn’t in a cloud.

You can learn enough about Linux to be decent at your job on only VMs if you’re dedicated, but I’d argue that until you’ve also dealt with hypervisors, bare metal, and hardware issues, you’re missing some of the picture.

“That’s no longer applicable, so why should I care?” Because it pops up everywhere I’ve been. Random build server that everyone forgot about but is critical suddenly shits itself, it’s running some ancient version of Ubuntu, and it’s all hand-rolled. Someone decided to provision a bunch of EC2s with bash, but they made critical errors like not knowing to make a new initramfs after configuring mdadm, so now the RAID disappears on reboots.

Understanding the fundamentals has always and will always matter. Anyone telling you differently is selling you something.