This seems to be a big issue with the general fediverse community attitude to me. It reminds me a lot of the Linux community 10+ years ago, constantly downplaying some pretty huge technical hurdles that new people need to climb, and then wondering why it struggle so much to gain traction.
In most companies, most of what a devops “role” does would be handled by backend devs anyway. Plenty of crossover between a devops role and a backend dev role. The important thing is to get some work experience anywhere in development to make yourself look way more appealing in future job applications.