Sure if you put enough effort in you can make everything usable and cheap. But why put in the effort into that instead of investing it into building a system that naturally fufills such requirements?

Kubernetes was never intended as a system for hobbyists, but for bringing more users onto google cloud. At that it is incredibly successful. But in exchange a lot of other stuff it does really badly.

It is much better to start with a single-node system in mind that expects getting more nodes at some point and develop from there. This will bring in a lot of hobbyists and really carves out how to solve the developer story. Then this will grow automatically with the size of popular projects building on it.

That said, of course it's nice if people invest energy into finding other usecases for k8s as well. But it shouldn't be the community's main effort.