I think it's too easy to just poo poo the claim. The author of that article was talking about a specific development approach using a dev-ops, service oriented architecture with cloud backends, and the role of the DBA in that environment is far from clear. In that mode, developers (teams) are supposed to own their own services from top to bottom. Because the theory is that each service is fully independent and shares nothing, including data. Any data integration between services runs through API's.

In that environment, the operational tasks (backup, DR, monitoring) are handled by the cloud data provider. And responsibility falls on the developers to set them up to meet their SLA. Instead of a shared data store, data consistency is managed by a pipeline or messaging model. Since data is not globally shared, there is no "crown jewels" for the DBA to protect. The place where I see the DBA as offering the most benefit in that environment is as a person with a deep knowledge of data technologies who can provide that expertise to other teams. That is a very different way of working than the ownership model most of us are used to. But since that model provides huge advantages in getting products to market quickly, it's one we need to get used to.