[sixo]

I think you have a lot of people coming into the general backend/business-logic tech space who are not nearly enough of "computer people" or engineering-minded to actually be responsible for the uptime of a mission critical workload. They might think they are, but they don't know what it actually takes. (Your "operators and engineers", ostensibly, CAN handle this, but they need to be up to the task too.)

K8s among other things is a way of trying to abstract away the most computer/OS/network-literate parts of a software organization, so that you can be productive, as an org, hiring some computer people along with plenty of the readily-available "smart people who can write code." The former keeps your software running, the latter represent your business as code. It's a way of solving for the hiring market you HAVE, rather than the hiring market of 20 yrs ago. But it hinges on those deep-tech people being up to the task.