[jbnorth]

Honestly I felt the same way for a while but the more I'm exposed to both Fortune 500 companies and ones who have a handful of employees I see Kubernetes as just a good starting point rather than adopting it later.

It removes the overhead of a lot of what sysadmins and devs of yesteryear did by hand or had to have a career's worth of experience to do quickly.

That's not to say that people don't need to know what they're getting into when they adopt kubernetes but especially when you're using a managed offering and not on the bleeding edge of what it supports it's pretty easy in terms of overhead and maintenance.

[WorldMaker]

The big win seems to be "GitOps". There are other tools for "GitOps" than Kubernetes, Kubernetes is just the elephant in the room in terms of size/scale/current adoption patterns. (Certainly not "ease of use", though.) I think one of the themes in comments here is how much people want more "middle ground" "GitOps" tools somewhere between "Serverless" (especially given vendor lock in in that space) and Kubernetes.