Ah yes, the magic cloud where you don't need to lift a finger and everything is safe and works and everybody is having a good time!
The only ways I have seen admin jobs disappearing is that they're renamed to "DevOps Engineer" or a company starts in a magic cloud with no admins and devs doing everything which more often than not turns into a dumpster fire and then they start searching for admins.
You may need less people to manage the cloud but someone certainly has to manage it. Unless someone has a specific responsibility to manage infra or someone personally cares about those things then things go unchecked, ports open to the internet that shouldn't be, no backups, etc., devs are usually concerned with making their app work and not those things.
And this isn't a knock on developers, there's only so much info you can retain and focus on so many things on a day to day basis that there's a need for people to specialize in certain areas.
The way I understood "was only lightly documented" was they were blaming themselves like "we didn't put much work into it and didn't document it very well".
I've noticed that a few times with people pretending to care about open source but in reality they care mostly about the free as in free beer part.
Not that long ago there was an announcement by GitHub where they talked about adding a feature for developers to monetize their projects. I don't remember what it was exactly but I think it was that you could make the releases only available to people who paid and some people were outraged. This isn't even a new thing, people were selling copies of OSS for decades.
And it's not only about money. There's too much shitting on OSS devs for minor problems. Some project doesn't get updated every day and people just start blasting the dev even though they got the software for free with no strings attached.
I'm not saying you can't criticize but personally I'm a lot more lenient on something I got completely for free, no limits, no contracts.
It's like saying a car is too complicated because I can't just swap the engine out without any prior knowledge. It's not designed for the average guy to be able to do that.
systemd is not some product meant for the average Joe, it's an integral part of the system for managing services and other things. To run a web server at least somewhat reliably you don't even need a lot of systemd knowledge but you still need to know some networking, firewalls, DNS, in general how the internet works, how to configure a web server and other services, some basic security. If you don't want to learn these things then there are managed services that you pay to do those things for you or you hire someone to run it for you. Just like you take your car to a mechanic when you're not interested in figuring out how to reassemble the engine.
Yeah, things can always be improved and made simpler but to create something fool-proof for the average person would take a huge amount of work and there would need to be a business opportunity there for someone to invest in that or there would need to be some passionate generous soul that would invest their time in a project like that.
And like I already mentioned, there are already solutions to the "it's too complicated" problem: 1) companies offering managed services, 2) companies/individuals for hire to do it for you.
Basically everyone that studied something like computer science in the 90s were electrical engineers and the computer stuff was barebones, it was more hardware. Software development like we know it wasn't a thing back then so people started late compared to the west.
I have a dev in his 40s and a sysadmin in his 50s as co-workers but that's rare because of the things you mentioned. With that much experience, high demand and low competition at that level they're going to have cushy jobs that they want to have and won't be sitting at crappy outsource shops.
AWS itself has a Secrets Manager from which other authorized services can pull secrets. If it's an outside CI/CD platform then those usually also have a place to store credentials.
I agree that this would be a good solution. I'm merely bringing up that it takes consideration. Also someone will need to learn the Secrets Manager and also learn credentials management for CI/CD. It's probably at least a day of work if you're not familiar with it.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think anyone should skip this step. You need auth for your datastores.
Managed services don't save you from that. You still have to configure security groups to reach them and a lot of devs just use the easiest way and expose the thing to the internet.
The only ways I have seen admin jobs disappearing is that they're renamed to "DevOps Engineer" or a company starts in a magic cloud with no admins and devs doing everything which more often than not turns into a dumpster fire and then they start searching for admins.
You may need less people to manage the cloud but someone certainly has to manage it. Unless someone has a specific responsibility to manage infra or someone personally cares about those things then things go unchecked, ports open to the internet that shouldn't be, no backups, etc., devs are usually concerned with making their app work and not those things.
And this isn't a knock on developers, there's only so much info you can retain and focus on so many things on a day to day basis that there's a need for people to specialize in certain areas.