[jgr447]

Not having used it in any meaningful way, after a lot of reading I am sometimes still unclear with the value proposition.

The value imho could be in being able to package distributed applications and deploy across cloud providers or on prem, seamlessly.

I don't think this is true though short of doing a lot of effort to abstract access to a gcp/aws/azure managed service (say, a db), which is probably a bad idea.

If you take that away, then a lot of the replication, autoscaling, load balancing, failover etc. can be implemented using cloud providers without having to manage the complexity of k8s.

Hope to be proven wrong here.