You still need a sysadmin to set up your CI systems in a continuous delivery world. You still need people to debug performance issues -- most developers don't know enough about system I/O to do that effectively.
You're right in that there's no longer some heavy-handed change control process, but wrong that sysadmins will go away. We just call them DevOps instead, but it's the same skill set, just embedded inside a dev team.
In order to be able to usefully debug perf issues you need to have a fairly deep understanding of systems architecture though or you're no better off than the software devs that you're slamming. There are a lot of "I don't need to learn programming" system admins whose knowledge of how to debug performance issues I could teach to a decent software developer in an afternoon. There are even more SAs who cargo cult completely incorrect assumptions and tend to throw money semi-randomly at problems because the last time they had a wonky server they upgraded the RAM so this time if they spend the money or more RAM that'll fix it too.
And yes, I've had to painfully explain why Linux servers report nearly all their memory as being fully used and what the VM free is was to a Principle Architect at a major internet firm with a string of PhDs and who had built the software architecture of the company from its founding. Controlling a huge chunk of the technical direction of the company and doesn't know the first thing about the VM or how to tell if a server is really out of RAM or not. There's still going to be a skillset which is closer to the hardware, but people need to really have that skillset. Most people who call themselves SAs do not actually have that skillset, they're just semi-technical people who wield root power and throw their weight around the company.
Yeah, a system administrator who doesn't know how to program is just as useless. Why avoid a supremely useful tool because you have some personal aversion to it? You describe people who really don't have a technical mindset to problem solving and were never taught that you need data to back up your hunches. Unfortunately, a lot of those people tend to get stuck in the "system administrator" role because many sysadmin tasks can be easy and repetitive, and putting them on those tasks keeps them away from anything they could break.
Architecture is a "10,000 foot view" type job. I do a good bit of architecture work, and I don't give a flying fuck about how much RAM is in a server or how many CPUs it has. I care about the function the server performs, whether that performance is adequate relative to current demand, and whether the architecture can scale to handle 10-100x that demand. When I was a sysadmin, I used to care about RAM/CPU tuning, but it's not relevant to my current work so I have forgotten a lot of technical details. I do know that if I think a system isn't adequately tuned to its use case, I can go talk to my performance testing team and they will investigate, generate a hypothesis and test that hypothesis.
You still need a sysadmin to set up your CI systems in a continuous delivery world. You still need people to debug performance issues -- most developers don't know enough about system I/O to do that effectively.
You're right in that there's no longer some heavy-handed change control process, but wrong that sysadmins will go away. We just call them DevOps instead, but it's the same skill set, just embedded inside a dev team.