I think the higher level goals are pretty much aligned with those of kubernetes. That it uses 'containers' to achieve this, is just a side effect.

And it's surprising flexible! You don't need any overlay networking, you can just define a IP range and it will 'just work' as long as your nodes are in the same ethernet segment. If you grow to more than, let say, 500-1000 pods, you need some routing but still can do without overlay networks.

I'm currently working on a project where I use the kubelet standalone. I can give it a pod manifest and it will make sure the specified containers are running. This doesn't need any cluster components or data stores and is already useful for tiny use cases. Also using this now for my tests instead of docker-compose.