Because it increased the knowledge of the domain you were developing for.
Which is precisely the article's main point. You can do those things because that knowledge will help you as a developer. That's why you can do those things, it doesn't mean you should do those things.
Very one-sided view of the world. Apparently developers are the only people who are capable of learning new things and Ops people can't possibly be able to understand the magic of code. (Not saying that there aren't places that expect "devs" to everything and call that "DevOps", but a lot of things are called "DevOps")
It really is not something you should ever ignore.