As someone working on the marketing side of the endeavor, I see the shift the author describes. there are a handful of PaaS companies picking up where Heroku left off and in the enterprise world devops is evolving toward "platform engineering". Platform engineering suffers from being poorly defined, but there appears to be growing demand within large enterprises for something like internal-heroku. But there's still a problem.
To me, the problem is not kubernetes. The problem is that tooling has become so specialized that the focus of work has become integration between tools. And that cumulative integration work complicates the operational responsibilities of software developers. Even if you have a dedicated devops team, the complexity of those integrations flows down to developers in the form of different systems for logging, monitoring, firewall, cdn, ci/cd, secrets, etc.
