I think that may be hehind some of these tales of 'luddite sysadmins'. Sysadmins need to keep things running and complexity and dependencies, even if they being convenience is something that makes them nervous. It's not about being a luddite, its about being able to hold a mental map of how it all works, so that when it stops working you can dive in.
And not to mention getting called at 2 am because something didn't build or the release bombed and having to examine, for the first time, some over-complicated mechanism to build things that goes through some pipeline where you're eyeballing large log files full of long exception chains.
Devs see the world as one where velocity and progress is among the most important, while 'sysadmins' (a term no longer used by companies and recruiters, unfortunately) have to worry about keeping the applications actually up so they can be used.
DevOps just seemed to have swept the sysadmin under the rug under some pretty words about breaking down barriers. It feels more that devs broke down the wall sometimes. The amount of infrastructure chaos and mess and confusion I see today (as a contractor bouncing around different places) seems higher than traditional infrastructure shops of 10+ years ago.
This is very true. Having a mental map of how things work is vital for correct (and good) troubleshooting.
Also, a ton of people use abstraction as an excuse to not learn a body of knowledge that contains fundementals (especially on the systems side).
In comparison to network engineering for instance, where having (quite) low level knowledge of how protocols work and interact with each other is vital.
