[VirusNewbie]

>s SRE a byproduct of a bubble economy of easy money? Why not operate without the significant added expense of SRE teams?

I'm a SWE SRE. I think in some cases it is better to be folded into a team. In other cases, less so.

One SRE team can support many different dev teams, and often the dev teams are not at all focusing time on the very complicated infra/distributed systems aspect of their job, it's just not something that they worry about day to day.

So it makes sense to have an 'infra' that operates at a different granularity than specialized dev teams.

That may or may not need to be called SRE, or maybe it's an SRE SWE team, or maybe you just call it 'infrastructure' but at a certain scale you have more cross cutting concerns across teams where it's cheaper to split things out that way.