I first had the DE title 7 years ago (going into it having never heard of DE), and have been doing MLE/platform work for the past 5. You’re projecting your limited experience onto a poorly defined role that varies wildly from company to company. My experience is much different from yours: little firefighting, lots of actual building. Yes there is infrastructure, but any good programmer these days should be able to stand up some basic infrastructure.

Yes, don’t get into it if you want to do ML research or apply ML, but if you are interested a bit in it and find building models the least creative, most boring shit ever like I do, and prefer traditional coding, it’s a nice spot to be in.