As someone trying to be primarily a dev who keeps getting roped into doing ops stuff for deploying my stuff, my experience is the exact opposite, and in particular putting Kubernetes on the end as the least complicated technology seems outright crazy to me, like, seriously, what on Earth are you talking about? You literally can't bring up a hello world web app without basically knowing everything you needed to know to bring it up on bare metal, and everything you needed to know to bring it up on a VM (whose crazy virtual networking stuff now seems like simplicity itself compared to Docker/Kubernetes), and everything you need to know to bring it up in Docker, and everything you need to know to bring it up in Kubernetes... and you need some sort of solution around building Docker images, too, so you're still going to need to know that, too.
There's all kinds of reasons this is necessary and there's all kinds of reasons why provising a new hardware server, blasting a Linux distro on to it, and just running your server is a bad idea. By no means am I proposing we need to go back to some glorious past, where losing a single hard drive sector means "oh well, guess the database is gone! recovery plan? Our recovery plan is to not need the database anymore!" I'm just saying, it's crazy to think this is all getting simpler. Try looking at this through the eyes of a fresh grad sometime.
Granted, I'm a bit crabby that literally every time I go to deploy something new, on a roughly 18 month time frame (the intervening time being maintenance and feature development), I have to go learn something else for my one-off task. (I don't think devops manages to beat the Node/JS world for churn, but it's probably in second place.) But still, it's getting more and more complicated, not less, and I don't even sense that we've passed an inflection point on the complexity reducing yet.
Those "all kinds of reasons" aren't necessarily valid, though, because it's not actually possible to go back to that caricature of the past that you describe.
The reason it's not possible is that some things actually have gotten simpler, at least from a user's perspective.
Automatic bad-block relocation has been standard for effectively forever. Even line-speed hardware RAID has been affordable for so long that it's not even a question. Hardware, in general, is routinely villified as being a nightmare, when the reality is that it's boringly reliable and, more importantly, has predictable enough failure rates that there are simple, standard engineering solutions around the failures (often already baked in).
That "inflection point" may well just end up being peeling away all the abstraction layers to discover that simplicity underneath works just fine, since we don't live in the 20th century any more.
The reason for this is the enormous cost benefits (its super cheap, you only pay when your code actually runs, no upfront costs, no passive server costs, no overprovision or underprovision of compute resources etc).
The servless approach has its place just like everything else, it’s not a panacea though.
I think containers is the future but we need idiot-proof GUI systems that Heroku and similar services provide to wire up our applications, and we need a good way to handle persistence, which many modern tools ignore.
Kubernetes' uptake is nowhere close to AWS by any measure. And AWS is the #1 public cloud that hosts Kubernetes workloads.
It's every IT vendor in the world vs. AWS, and so far, they're winning. Kubernetes and open platforms have a shot, but they're not moving fast enough yet in the direction that matters - up the stack.
Rolled it back into KVM/QEMU in colo with a glue layer REST interface over virsh and will never look back.
Of course we don't use containers..they don't offer an overt benefit in HPC...and I don't think they ever will.
There is a much bigger market for infrastructure in the cloud than people realize, and I will be very surprised if kubernetes is not replaced in 5 years.
What will very likely not be going away in the next decade is networks.
Unless we can build tooling for setting up the network infrastructure below all these cloud tools, you will still be stuck with people doing admin work like 30 years ago. From personal experience: k8s clusters are easy. Building the hardware and especially networking below so that everything actually can be automated in k8s... whole different story.