Some developers may have avoided it, but IT definitely hasn't. Network engineers, server admins, and DBAs routinely have to work a full schedule, plus change windows, and have to be on call. Some are on call 24/7 with no extra pay. When I switched companies almost a decade ago I went from being a network guy who knew how to code, to a coder who knew networking. My quality of life increased over night.
When my company started standardizing pay I was an SRE. There were no additional benefits for being an SRE despite a massive on-call commitment with highly disruptive false positives that required investigation as we were trying to tune the alerting system. I made the exact same pay as a SWE that never had to do this extra work and were often annoyed if they were paged to act as a SME. This moment is when I transitioned out of SRE work and into SWE work.
