Teams do DevOps. It isn't supposed to be an excuse to make developers do everything. It's supposed to combine operations and development on the same team.
This is just like the perversion of agility in development by "Agile."
I recently was part of a team that properly practiced DevOps and as soon as it started working we had a reorg and it was broken apart.
If the premise of the article is "Developer time is precious, don't make them do grunt work" the I would counter with "Developer momentum is precious, don't let developers get blocked by operations/QA/release."
On our team, we had Ops and QA. But I needed something done and they were already working on something then I could have a quick 15 minute chat after standup about the Puppet change I needed to make and then go do it myself. An hour later I'm done, the change is deployed and I'm moving on to the next task. Now, without an embedded Ops resource on the team, I have to file a ticket and pray someone picks it up within a few days.
The way to not get "blocked by QA" is to have automated tests and QA people who can write them as well as dream up scenarios to break your toys. They are also able to do code reviews in your stack as well.
If you've read the Phoenix Project, it clearly states DevOps solves the problem of bottlenecks, which is the single most important aspect in the Product Development lifecycle.
You just can't have developers waiting anymore for Ops to do something, or vice versa... Shit needs to go fast and blocking factors need to disappear, or else you sacrifice agility
"Full-stack" is a skillset for founders/first employees and hack-of-all-trades SREs. Later on in a now enterprise shop, deployments and development gets formalized, so it's crucial to have people/service providers whom know the nitty-gritty of the stack components really well... but it would be a distraction to expect a senior Postgres DBA to know client-side JavaScript. The overlap on the interface between sysadmining and development is deployment, where TwelveFactors-like shops can excel and reduce dev-ops turf wars. DevOps is about working together to make the overall service better; not shifting responsibilities around, getting people to take on more hats or renaming sysadmins.
Disclaimer: I've been a (in no particular order): industrial embedded developer, sysadmin, engineering manager, founder, security researcher, consultant and SRE.
Yeah, the dentist analogy was really interesting because there's no way in hell you'd have the receptionist and hygienist and dentist just throwing things over a wall to each other and not coordinating carefully on patient care, yet without DevOps that's all too often what happens.
Teams do DevOps. It isn't supposed to be an excuse to make developers do everything. It's supposed to combine operations and development on the same team.
This is just like the perversion of agility in development by "Agile."
This, too, shall pass.