The definition I liked best, which I _think_ came from one of the Google SRE books though I'm not certain, was: "SRE is what happens when you consider operations to be a software problem".

I share your disdain for buzzwords but SRE is definitely a different role.

Nope, SREs keep applications running on a platform. Lots of metrics, tools to deploy apps in whatever rollout process the company has, etc.

In small companies, sysadmin might be a duty of the SRE team, but they definitely diverge if you have a large on-prem deployment or work with bespoke VMs in the cloud.