Indeed. I think the other big elephant in the room not mentioned in the article is architecture.
If you've built your project as cloud-native from day one, you'll have a lot less DevOps work to do. You're basically just writing code or templates that apply cloud-based configuration. That's not to say there's no complexity, but it's not unreasonable.
If your org has already gone all-in on microservices and Kubernetes, there is a much stronger case to be made for centralized Ops. The amount of understanding, care, feeding, and training necessary is much higher. You won't be able to get by with one or two contributors occasionally making changes to Terraform templates as necessary. Clusters are expensive, require occasional upgrades, and centralized metrics and logging don't come for free and require their own access control. It's still better than it's ever been, but it's a lot like building and maintaining your own cloud, which quickly becomes a full-time job.
If the team building the application is designing the infrastructure, then that's almost the DevOps ideal that orgs dream about. It's really the stuff that happens once you've been launched for a few months that things start to drift. It might start with a redirect rule that isn't in code, an ask to do cost optimization, a security audit. Maybe one dev raises their hand and a few months later they're the DevOps lead with a DevOps team who become the dumping ground for all the non-coding task, on-call, budgeting. Even if your platform is all PaaS and SaaS and serverless, stuff will still break and someone needs to answer the pages.
If you've built your project as cloud-native from day one, you'll have a lot less DevOps work to do. You're basically just writing code or templates that apply cloud-based configuration. That's not to say there's no complexity, but it's not unreasonable.
If your org has already gone all-in on microservices and Kubernetes, there is a much stronger case to be made for centralized Ops. The amount of understanding, care, feeding, and training necessary is much higher. You won't be able to get by with one or two contributors occasionally making changes to Terraform templates as necessary. Clusters are expensive, require occasional upgrades, and centralized metrics and logging don't come for free and require their own access control. It's still better than it's ever been, but it's a lot like building and maintaining your own cloud, which quickly becomes a full-time job.