From my perspective k8s is really good for a company who has a team of experienced SRE who can manage k8s well and the company has a marketing team driving new development that needs to get to market fast
It is not cheaper than simple autoscale groups, it is not easier than rebuilding packages with jenkins ( rpm spec files or debian src rebuilds )
It is however the current popular framework so if you want to ride the wave learn it. Also learn how to migrate away from it as that will be a future role as several early adopters are pulling back out of it.
The larger issue is the simple fact automating cloud infrastructure is not trivial so abstract layers lets more people implement things without understanding the lower levels giving folks the appearance of having a complete framework.
It works great until it doesn't. Then it is interesting watching people try to figure out how to fix it.
Learn the lower levels of Linux and k8s will come to you organically