> Also, at least from what I've witnessed, the kind of sysadmin activities often stated as those that cloud eliminates was already becoming a vanishingly small element of the day-to-day work involved in being a sysadmin.

This. Most of my work is not technical and consists of technical-ish meetings, and budget arguments.

Automation is part of that, but also that a lot of stuff is fairly robust and works (mostly) after initial config. Three weeks of setup, plus some shakedown (and a few late nights when the new mission-critical system stutters), but then it's mostly autopilot, or scheduled maintenance.