The problem is incentives and authority. It used to be that Ops owned uptime, and therefore it was their right to tell Engineering to go fuck themselves when they asked to put some spacecamp graph database or whatever in production. Now everyone is "devops" and nobody can tell anyone anything.
I've never actually worked in an org where infra could overrule product in such a way. If some director wants a whizbang new database your job is to facilitate the resulting tire fire.
