After almost 10 years in the systems engineering / administration / devops / cloud etc space all I can say is:
The biggest improvement that devops brought is that it made managers feel dumb, outdated and scared because they were not "doing devops" while everybody else was, so they kinda started listening to sysadmins and what they had to tell.
Uh, devops engineers did not come out of nowhere. They did not come out of the ground like mushrooms. Most if not all the "devops engineers" i know are just former sysadmins. They were already willing to do whatever devops was supposed to be, it's just they they were largely ignored.
Writing this I just realized that maybe the best way to obtain organizational change is to make management and upper management feel stupid and outdated. Interesting.