tbh, something similar happened to me too. I took over a sysadmin job, multiple servers. They had a lot of problems in the backend, because of bad configs, sometimes they spent days resolving the same issues on multiple servers, without trying to fix the root causes. I just took the time and went through the configs and corrected them. Also made some simple scripts that do the same thing that they did manually. No one knows how much is changed in the background, so they don't bother me with how much I actually work with the administration, they just know they used to spend hours with problems before, now nothing really comes up, maybe one problem every two months. Now my job with them is just generating monthly health reports, spending five minutes looking through the logs, making the invoices and being available when something doesn't work.
So yeah I can believe the poster. Some firms never thought about automatization, maybe they don't even know how much is possible, so they are happy to pay the same amount if everything just works, without bothering you about actual time spent with it. Maybe it even works better, than it used to when the other dude did it manually as a full time job.
you can get a performant 4 core arm64 vps from oracle for free, had no speed impediment with wireguard on it. It's free 24/7... the affordability of arm...
My problem is that things start to depend on it, like snapd... I was looking into running anbox on wsl today, but I realized I need to compile stuff, because they distribute anbox in snap form only, so I kind of gave up...
So yeah I can believe the poster. Some firms never thought about automatization, maybe they don't even know how much is possible, so they are happy to pay the same amount if everything just works, without bothering you about actual time spent with it. Maybe it even works better, than it used to when the other dude did it manually as a full time job.