We had ArgoCD running perfectly. Every deployment was reconciled from Git. Drift detection worked. Rollbacks were one-click. Our GitOps setup was clean.

Developers still couldn't provision a staging environment without pinging the platform team.

That gap — between "GitOps in place" and "developers can actually self-serve" — is where most platform engineering teams get stuck. GitOps solves a real problem. It just doesn't solve all the problems people think it solves.

What GitOps Actually Solves

Let's be precise, because GitOps deserves credit where it's due.

ArgoCD (17k+ GitHub stars) and Flux are excellent tools for one specific job: keeping your cluster state in sync with what's declared in Git .…