People starting to put abstractions over it means a) there's a chance people will start asking for a given abstraction rather than Kubernetes, and not care if that abstraction eventually subsumes or replaces Kubernetes, b) at least some people think Kubernetes is enough of a nuisance to deal with to be looking for alternatives.
Whether that means Kubernetes is dying, I'm not so sure. But Kubernetes is extremely complex for a lot of workloads that it's total overkill for, so I'm not surprised people are looking for options.
Could you explain how you arrive to that conclusion from seeing some proyect offering an alternative autoscaling engine?
The only issue I have with the default HorizontalPodAutoscaler is that I cannot scale down to 0 when some processing queues are empty. Other than that, we have shrines erected to k8s.
However, I wonder what you mean? Kubernetes from where I sit has almost complete ubiquity across most companies. Even in places where it's a poor fit.