Is it bad to start as a DevOps now? Is already irrelevant as job role?

That term as a Job role is so vague it will always be relevant. In simple terms it is a Developer that understands Infrastructure. Even a platform engineer 'could' be described as a DevOps

Hi @LordSilver what do you understand by DevOps? I don’t think it’s irrelevant to be a DevOps in 2022. It’s still really highly requested by companies

So what's the purpose of the so-called "platform engineering"? just a rebrand?

Platform Engineer is a title for a job position. You would still need to use same DevOps methodologies. Its just emphasizes certain aspects of the work a DevOps engineer would do. So yes, you can start the morning as a devops engineer and end the day as a platform engineer. Not exactly a rebrand but more management vision changing or someone managed to sell a product to the company. The day DevOps is not needed, is the day we wont have developers anymore so youre going to be learning and practicing DevOps and CAM for quite some time

don’t pick jobs based on titles

^ that but also salary

For the foreseeable future, there will continue to be a need for specialists who can confirm/verify whether or not software that works on a developer’s dev environment will work in production. There are a lot of ways to solve that problem, and which approach to take varies across circumstances. But as long as the problem exists, there will be a need for people to solve it. I’ve been solving the problem for close to 30 years now. I solve it very differently today than I did when I started, because the technology has changed radically. The problem itself still remains, however.

and always will, its called the human factor :)

salary isn’t the only reason to take a job, it’s part of a holistic view of your life, i remember a quote from larry page at all hands about roles being place and time important. I really recommend anyone saying “is this job right”’etc to read start with the why

Hope noone is promoting the idea that DevOps is irrelevant or dead….

Anyone that does, its either trying to get engagement via click bait or trying to sell a tool or both

If you google “devops is dead”, you’ll get plenty of hits. But, as @Arie Heinrich says, it’s mostly clickbait.