I enjoy using Kubernetes on bare metal nodes at home and took it over Proxmox, quite happy with it (not so happy with costs of hardware to expand the cluster though)
Agree! There are a ton of people out there that are happily running k8s on their homelab and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I tried it and found it was just too much for me.
Tbf I do the exact same thing at work and love doing abstractions that "technically" makes maintainence easier. Kubernetes fortunately is extremely automatable.