The idea of a minimum viable product, or MVP, is an idea drilled into the mind of the modern startup engineer. At its core, it's executing just enough to be able to test a product hypothesis.
A product doesn't exist in a vacuum, to survive, there must be a market to consume, and more importantly, a strong market to sustain it, also known as product-market fit. A product (usually) isn't just a technical capability/feature, after all, we've all seen the graveyard of capable tools that see no adoption because it's too hard to use. The user interface/experience is, a lot of the time, what people will remember.
As a site reliability engineer, SRE, we're most commonly positioned as an enablement team: producing standards, best practices, guidance, and self serve tooling to enable product teams tp work autonomously.
I think this requires a bit of a different mindset from the startup mvp product engineer: unlike a startup fighting for survival in the open market, our customer base is fixed and captive. With the appropriate blessings from management, we can be a monopoly on providing/accessing a particular service/feature.
With a captive market and monopoly power, the environmental conditions for testing MVPs no longer exist. No matter how bad your UX/product is, you can hide it with high adoption rates via management directives. The MVP becomes a hollow word and arbitrary cutoff for features you put in.
Am I too jaded? Perhaps. Or maybe I'm suffering from the continuous lack of product managers wherever I go...