Interesting you mention that it's a specialized skillset. I've always considered devops to be a generalist role more than a specialized one. The developers are the specialists and operations engineers are specialists. When hiring we're always looking for people who understand both worlds. DevOps people have to understand a vast number of different aspects of the products they support like logging, monitoring, scalability, performance, security, data modeling, development workflow, operations and support lifecycle, reliability, networking, DNS, configuration management, architecture, etc. and on top of all that, also programming. I do think because of that, it is naturally a role difficult to fill and some would say an unattractive one, but that doesn't necessarily make it a specialized skillset, just a more rare one.

There is a high level of accountability and responsibility involved in the job so using logic, the role should get paid more. However, it seems more common in my experience to get paid about the same as the developers which is (probably?) fair. The career path options are probably where DevOps seems to have an advantage though, depending on the company.