I fully agree with you: it is mostly an education problem and you can find people willing to learn right out of univ. Indeed, that is exactly my experience: I successfully onboarded several (carefully selected) junior people into the ops skillset over the years and I have seen them do wonders with customer systems, while enjoying their "ops life", without having fires every day.

The connection of this to the replies above it: I am not sure if this kind of junior people would be easy to retain in a large corporate environment. We certainly can do that in niche consulting.