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This isn’t a value judgment on database administration, just an anecdote:

I’ve worked at 5 small companies in the last 15 years, and freelanced for a few years. The dev team size was: (15, 5, 5, 4, 8). None of those companies had a DBA. One company we had a full time IT/sysadmin, but otherwise that role was filled by people with a title like “software engineer”.

In truth, I think we often would have benefited from the expertise of a DBA, but we never made the decision to hire someone for that role full time.