In your experience with these deployments, which K8s features aren't needed? Is it the orchestration as such that's not necessary, or K8s approach wrt to the workloads deployed?
I guess the popular term is "cargo culting". Or maybe Heroku is not hip anymore although it probably is the best advice for many companies.
Developers really love working with Kubernetes. It doesn't take a lot to get started and if you're not doing anything too crazy it is a huge productivity boon IMO.
Where things get hairy is persistence, but that's the case regardless of Kubernetes or not.
This number of tools speaks for itself. Yeah, you would be better off with out of the box stuff due to lack of skills.