I was working on large scale deployments with multiple datacenters, multiple databases, message passing networks and running multiple customer-facing products.
Load balancers and HA setups were already in use. LVS existed. VMs were popular. "CI/CD" existed, without that name.
2005: your infrastructure is automated using a handful of Bash, Perl and Python scripts written by two system administrators. They are custom, sometimes brittle and get rewritten every 5 years.
2022: your infrastructure is automated using 10 extremely complex devops tools. You automated the two system administrators away - but then had to hire 5 DevOps engineers paid 2x more. The total complexity is 10x.
They wrote YAML, TOML, plus Ansible, Pulumi, Terraform scripts. They are custom, sometimes brittle and get rewritten every 3 years.
EDIT: to the people claiming that today's infra does more things... No, I'm comparing stuff with the same levels of availability, same deployment times, same security updates.
The very opposite.
> Security adds complexity
If anything, complexity is the enemy of security