His point is that Ops time is more expensive than Dev time, they get paid more. The Dev teams should really fix their own bugs if they happen in the wee-small-hours.
Not just that (since there's a lot of situations you may not be able to actually fix bugs in the moment, just work around them), but it also aligns incentives and enforces lessons learned. If you know you're gonna be on the other end of that pager, maybe that hack won't see the light of day. For more senior folks, pattern recognition around how things were built and what issues they led to are incredibly valuable. Being able to tell a junior engineer no don't do it like that, we did that last time and it led to x y and z, could save the company a ton of money and pain.
If you're separated out from ops, what would ever drill that into you? Saying you're too busy for ops is just wild to me. That's some of the highest effort to reward work someone can do.
