i think there's a clash of definition in that thread. Devops originaly was a job title for sysadmins with high automation skills and able to deploy to a cloud.
it later evolved to something much more management related.
Depends who you ask. Everyone seems to invent the definition that local-optimize for themselves. The book Good To Great goes into the dynamics, outside of IT, so is a general pattern.
It was, but in the end it couldn't, because as it turns out "developers" aren't really programmers and even the plan to make them responsible for their own messes is ultimately failing... very, very few people are truly meant and talented to program a computer, the rest have no business being in this industry and are in it for all the wrong reasons.
For programming a computer, correctly, elegantly, has always been an elitist, and will forever remain an elitist thing to do. It requires patience, dedication, perfectionism, something most of the people currently "developing" do not and will never have.
I have been preaching automation on the level of systems exchanging messages and reaching decisions based on the exchange of those messages for decades, which is why my designs have stood in production for decades. What will replace DevOps? OS packaging, as it was meant to, because it is the correct, optimal solution to very large scale automation of autonomous systems, which require no human interaction or oversight.