Aws is the original pioneer of such things. And the almost progrmmers you mentioned are known as devops. Btw, there is no such thing as almost programming… I sometimes feel writing kernel modules in c has no imagination. Programming is just a tool make things work.Exactly. And Google, being created with inventing SRE, themselves mention in their golden book on SRE that the SRE engineers are "almost" programmers (I forget the exact words). They know most of what their regular programming engineers know, so that they can take up complex automation work for what was earlier in dumber days called devops / infrastructure.
Anyhow; lot of good points being discussed here.