Company gave Star Performer award to a React developer, overlooked my hard work as a DevOps engineer

i’m a devops engineer, and i recently felt really upset when my company gave a "star performer" award to a react developer. don’t get me wrong, he’s great at his job and works hard, but it hurts that my work wasn’t recognized at all.

as the sole devops-focused person on my team, i work from cloud to helm, from cicd to terraform, security, deployment, cost, each and everything is my responsibility and I'm the first line of defense by responding to pagerduty alarms 24/7.

i told my manager i was unhappy, he said, “there are 50+ developers and only 3 devops engineers,” as if that explained why my work wasn’t recognized.