[hiAndrewQuinn]

I don't run k8s at home, but I have worked in k8s-heavy environments and studied it deeply. This is the accurate, nuanced take.

Few but not no people will ever run into problems at the kind of scale k8s operates at. Plus, learning how it "expects" the programs running inside its Pods to behave is kind of like learning how Django or Rails "expect" a web app to work - it's a more complicated style than just writing your own totally custom, hermetically-sealed Python apps for your personal use, sure, but it also comes with a slew of benefits in case you ever do hit that level of scale and want to move over.

Or, maybe you look over the app you're writing and say "Fat chance." In which case you can justify e.g. not making everything an API endpoint, keeping a ton of state mucking about, etc. But I still feel that's an improvement over not even realizing the questions are being asked.