The question is great. DevOps is a field that I really don't want to touch as a developer. I build frontend and backend as well, design databases and focus on UX and configure a LAMP stack, but that's where sysadmin ends for me.
What I don't want to mess with is the "DevOps" tools, like Docker and rest of cloud orchestration stuff. It's a very complex field and I couldn't care less. If I work on a project like that there's always somebody who can do that kind of setup.
DevOps, at its core, is just treating your configuration files and artifacts (IP/DNS, firewall rules, mail config, service and web app artifacts, libs and other stock software, SQL/NoSQL deployment descriptors, queue configs, users/roles/certificates) as development artifacts, and have an automated, reproducible deployment procedure. Going to a box and manually configure something in an ad-hoc fashion using fancy GUIs is considered a no-go. Rather, you're supposed to craft/test your configuration artifacts and then check it in to eg. git. If anything, this should be a workflow familiar to developers, hence "DevOps".
Docker and other Docker-like containers like Rocket don't have anything to do with DevOps per se, but they facilitate easier automated deployment of said configuration artifacts. Technically, Docker & Co. are just remedies to classical DLL hell situations, and have been used mostly for development and software evaluation purposes. Though they technically don't provide much more isolation than simple chroot-jails, increasingly they're also used in place of VMs because of density reasons, eg. because you can run a whole bunch of services on a single machine with less footprint than VMs (on Linux, that is).
The frenzy with Docker and the other cloud orchestration stuff, as you say, is IMHO mostly because of Sillycon startups with insane amounts of venture capital buying their way into people's minds.
Edit: ok, the last remark was a bit snarky; sure there's a need of mass-digestible tool for collaboratively editing DevOps artifacts and deployment plans, but I don't know any I like; feel free to point me to one (preferably without JSON and/or yaml configuration files)
What I don't want to mess with is the "DevOps" tools, like Docker and rest of cloud orchestration stuff. It's a very complex field and I couldn't care less. If I work on a project like that there's always somebody who can do that kind of setup.