Haha.. the brilliance of the "staple" article can only be realized by nostalgia. If you've experienced what she said - in India, in your childhood, among the then open-and-freely-mingling people - you would not compare it to a DC to Baltimore ride. Or any train ride in the Western world.
I personally related to every bit of that article. Used to go from Ahmedabad in Gujarat, to Chennai - in Navjeevan express that takes 36 hours, every other summer. Thanks to this author, I just relived that memory :)
I think the analogy with QA deserves some credit here. "Testing" as a part of software process has not gone away, but the people who solely did QA are now gone - either evolved into doing both dev and qa; or moved to companies where the older processes still exist.
Testing was more closer to writing-code - so that got absorbed into the dev side faster. Disappearing QA was a you-blink-and-you-miss revolution.
DevOps is a little farther. Several developers are not able to wrap their heads around the deployment systems, the implications of hardware and network etc. But they will. Eventually. Because they are smart people.
I think the message of the article is that people who solely have DevOps expertise, should look to evolve to developing code as well. That way we have smaller, well-knit teams with each member having an additional speciality other than writing code.
If I read just this piece of text anywhere, the word popping up in my mind would be zookeeper