I honestly don't understand the amount of negativity towards dockers and kubernetes sometimes.

All major cloud providers have a managed k8 service, so you don't have/need to learn much about the underlying system. You can spend a few days, at most, to learn about dockers, k8 configuration files and helm and you're pretty much set for simple workloads (and even helm might be overkill).

Afterwards, deploying, testing, reproducing things is, in my opinion, much better than managing your applications on random servers.

Might I be wasting some money on a k8 cluster? Maybe. Do I believe the benefits outweigh the money? Absolutely.