I've looked at k8s a while ago and it looked insanely complex to me. Maybe it's one of those things that you need to look at several times to understand it?
Kubernetes addresses a bunch of infrastructure concerns, so IMO it's more equivalent to learning a new cloud platform (AWS, Azure) than anything else. People who already know one or more cloud platforms, and are familiar with the kind of issues that come up with distributed and HA systems on cloud (e.g. networking, secrets management) may find Kubernetes much easier.