(SRE here)

Exactly. There was even a whole domain of expertise (SRE) that exploded because of the lack of engineering rigor. That's not to say if everyone did all the right things all the time there would be NO need for SREs, but there would be fewer of us - something that I've tried to communicate to everyone I've worked for in the past ~14 years of being one.

But we had to deliver. We had to increase shareholder value.

SREs became a thing because management realized the DevOps mindset of making your programmers DBAs and sys admins wasn't really working but management were too ashamed to admit they were wrong so they invented a new term.