GitOps as a practice has been in use since 2017 when Alexis Richardson coined the term. It transformed DevOps and automation. If you look at its core principles, it extends DevOps by treating Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Your deployment configuration is stored in a version control system (a.ka. Git), providing a single source of truth for both dev and ops.
As the framework’s adoption increased, GitOps became the standard for continuous deployment in the cloud native space. Many agile teams adopt GitOps because of familiarity with git-based workflow for the release management of cloud-native workloads.