The thing is that tests generally have to be a core part of the development process now, so if the QA isn't being driven by the devs then they aren't doing software engineering quite up to contemporary standards.
Having said that, I have had a lot of jobs on small teams, especially some years ago, where testing was inadequate or not really part of the development process, and I always tried to convince them to hire one good QA person. They never listened. Instead on a few occasions a user or business analyst would be assigned to QA which I explained was a joke. But I guess I have just not had the best budgeted projects or something.
I don't think testing and QA hit the same sweet spot. Trying to automate acceptance tests often gets into brittle territory, doubly so on mobile apps. Obviously it depends a lot on the nature of the product, but in a lot of cases human QA (perhaps with QA engineers building some partial automation) leads to a higher quality product at a lower cost than trying to get fully automated test coverage for everything.
I was a QA manager for a while. It's been over 10 years since I've worked somewhere that had any sense of QA/Test.
Now we have Horde, err, Scrum and DevOps. Proudly. It's like the industry just gave up.
I don't what it's like at the allegedly highest functioning teams (environments) Google, Facebook. But out here in the wild, it's madness.
Dan Luu has been best at capturing and articulating "contemporary standards" for what passes as "quality" in software development. http://danluu.com (I wish I was 1/2 as smart as Dan.)
Having said that, I have had a lot of jobs on small teams, especially some years ago, where testing was inadequate or not really part of the development process, and I always tried to convince them to hire one good QA person. They never listened. Instead on a few occasions a user or business analyst would be assigned to QA which I explained was a joke. But I guess I have just not had the best budgeted projects or something.