It's a mix. I'm a consultant that specializes in large scale distributed systems. I have some customers that have >100k production database nodes. I manage probably >50PB of data. I have designed large distributed systems for more than 100 customers.
consultant = charge > £600 a day to bring Docker to the company. Yet doesn't care when shit hits the fan 3 months later because he's already gone. In fact, he will never known about it.
By the way, How to have 100 customers => leave right after the design phase every single time. Clients add up quickly.
I do a mix of pure consulting but also managed services. I typically have a 12 hour SLA for issues, and 1 hour SLA for some customers. 24/7 support for mission critical, revenue generating systems. So no, I'm not just a talking head. It's usually me in the NOC on the hook in case things go wrong. I'm the world expert in this field, if you want things to work at scale people call me.
Individually I charge several orders of magnitude greater than what you're quoting. I'll advise and design, do deep troubleshooting etc.. Consultants that work for me (I'm the CEO) or a large SI will do the implementation.