[WHATDOESIT]

I'd certainly say it has merit - large companies have separate teams maintaining the Kubernetes/Git/CI/AWS/emailing/auth/etc cloud setup that's used by individual product teams, and what else is that if not "platform engineering"? They don't have anything to do with development, we have in-team DevOps guys for that kind of work - configuring the provided K8s for our particular services, making use of the cloud services the platform team has made available to us, writing the Dockerfiles, etc.

If your company is just one product or one team, it might be used as a buzzword. Not when there's tens of products, hundreds of dev teams and thousands of microservices - maintaining this kind of platform is a very distinct discipline from DevOps.