Definitions of the term are almost as diluted as "cloud" is. It is easier to define it as what it's not.
Look up Jez Humble for a bit more idea into the origins of the term. The term is a primarily a buzzword among larger companies and almost always followed up by some engineering cultural change objective rather than about how code is deployed or even developed and run. You know that it's another management-focused trend when there's entire conferences where people say devops constantly without mentioning anything about code and half the folks in attendance or speaking are consultants in suits that consider Excel formulas the extent of their coding skills.
So the common theme I see is "any way besides what we used to do operations traditionally." It's mostly used for "operations with some idea of what is being deployed on the stack above them." Most start-ups don't have this problem at all with modern infrastructure (no more rack and stack at your 5-man start-up probably) though by definition because rigidly defined roles are a Big Company Problem.
The problem modern startups have is that a developer sees he can make calls to AWS or Azure APIs and assumes that makes him qualified to define system architecture, security policies, deployment processes, etc.
"Modern" infrastructure (by which I assume you mean provisioned, destroyable VPS instances + associated services such as AWS, Azure, etc) is effectively just a new "how" - you call an API instead of deploying a config file or similar. You still need to know the "what" and the "why" to be effective.
I don't necessarily see the situation as inflated egos as much as lack of resources to do it better. I have rarely met developers that are excited to do operations work like defining and implementing system security policies, change control, and orchestration. It's a chore that's as exciting for them as doing their laundry.
I'm being very conservative with what "modern" means (within the past 20 years is about right). Traditional shops are still racking and stacking machines and maybe deploying VMs by hand using ITIL stuff trying desperately to slow down system changes to deal with demand rather than to speed things up like most shops have done. Where I am now, the "traditional" IT side of the house takes roughly 5 months to provision a new server (I lead operations on anything bleeding edge, which is now standard for most start-ups).
Going from using maybe kickstart files to API calls is not as big of a deal as the fact that you can even get something on demand in any way instead of going, finding another job, quitting that job, coming back in shame, and realizing that the server you asked for is finally up.
I've definitely met developers who made the choice to say "I can do this myself, I don't need someone else to do it", and I've also met developers who when tasked with "make our app run" simply say "ok, its running on port 80, so it's up right?" without any of the associated work to make it secure, reliable, backed up, etc.
Look up Jez Humble for a bit more idea into the origins of the term. The term is a primarily a buzzword among larger companies and almost always followed up by some engineering cultural change objective rather than about how code is deployed or even developed and run. You know that it's another management-focused trend when there's entire conferences where people say devops constantly without mentioning anything about code and half the folks in attendance or speaking are consultants in suits that consider Excel formulas the extent of their coding skills.
So the common theme I see is "any way besides what we used to do operations traditionally." It's mostly used for "operations with some idea of what is being deployed on the stack above them." Most start-ups don't have this problem at all with modern infrastructure (no more rack and stack at your 5-man start-up probably) though by definition because rigidly defined roles are a Big Company Problem.