In my experience, this is mainly describing the sad state of sysadmin work at tech startups. Larger and profitable tech companies tend to take sysadmin work a bit more seriously and give more resources and authority (and pay...) to their TechOps/Devops/Security teams.
It seems reasonably common in agency type companies - at the start often their "infra" is an account with a managed web hosting company, ahd when their needs grow it doesn't always become a core part of the business
