Don't attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Seriously though k8s is Google-tier engineering, and probably works well for them. It works well for many organizations that have those levels of resources. But probably overkill for most.
We use Kubernetes on-prem using MickroK8s because it was easy to deploy and allowed me to write a full API server with scalability with no prior experience.
What “potential competitors” were kneecapped here?
Seriously though k8s is Google-tier engineering, and probably works well for them. It works well for many organizations that have those levels of resources. But probably overkill for most.