the question is if an early stage start-up with 4-5 devs where they typically already struggle to get basic CI in place ... and where 1 of the devs loves K8 and the others don't really know it (but don't object because it's nice to have it on the CV), whether they should really already focus on orchestration and scaling before they even have a MVP.

I'm not against k8 per se, but its complexity isn't something to ignore. It's all good if you have the people to run this but most places I know don't.

I think we have reached peak k8-hype last year when F. Campoy at GOTO suggested to wrap K8 around GO to make Go as resilient like Erlang/BEAM (see video below ...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScE9TnoWltA&t=1437s

as for ML I really think there are cool use-cases, but why would a pre-MVP start-up already be talking about hiring data scientists, ... when they don't even have any data (exception being they are an analytics start-up obviously).

this is how you get ants.