It's impossible to make essential complexity disappear but it is certainly possible to reduce incidental complexity. Most software is much more complex than it needs to be and Kubernetes is no exception.
Before k8s every serious shop automated the crap out of their infra. Jump/kickstart recipes, rolling cluster patching that split RAID mirrors before applying, blue/green deployment scripts to tickle the loadbalancer, cron jobs to purge old releases ...
That stack is super complex and utterly bespoke to the company.
With k8s it’s standardised and usually better quality.
It's on a path to standardised, but not there yet: etcd vs. others, different ingress controllers, providers replacing most of network parts, storage is bumpy/not so standard, deploy may be kubectl apply/helm/operator.
I would really appreciate a more mature ecosystem.
That stack is super complex and utterly bespoke to the company.
With k8s it’s standardised and usually better quality.