[petercooper]

Kubernetes is fantastic, though I think of it more as a tool for managing organizational complexity than ops. You can vertically scale beyond the level needed by most commercial applications nowadays using ad-hoc approaches on a machine or two with 16+ cores, 256GB+ RAM, terabytes of NVM drives, etc. but many (even small) companies have policies, teams, and organizational challenges that demand a lot of the structure and standardization tools like Kubernetes bring to the table.

So I'm not disagreeing with your assertion, but I'd perhaps scope it to saying it's useful overhead at significant organizational scale, but you can certainly operate at a significant technical scale without such things.. and that can be quite fun if you have the team or app for it :)