I don't know why you are being down-voted, you are not wrong - Kubernetes is not something I would roll out at a start of a project.
I think people are just excited to try it out so they often overlook the operational side of things.
They are mostly plain old PHP webapps, non-trivial amount of them Wordpress (shudduer), some done in random frameworks, some with ancient dependencies, some in node.js, one was ruby, etc. They are the equivalent of good old shared hosting stuff.
With kubernetes, we generally manage them in much simplified form, and definitely much cheaper than hosting multiple VMs to work around issues in conflicting dependencies at distro level or keeping track of our own builds of PHP.
We also run CI/CD on the same cluster. Ingress mechanics mean we have vastly simplified routing. Yes, we cheat a lot by using GKE instead of our own deployment of k8s, but we can manage that too, it's just cheaper that way.
Pretty much smooth sailing with little operational worries except the fact that Google's stackdriver IMO sucks :)