I'd tried Octant but found it rather slow for general use and went back to kubectl. With k9s however I use it extensively as it's so much quicker to get stuff done.

I do have it aliased to k9s --readonly by default to protect me from myself.

I really like octant and it’s been great seeing it get nicer each release.

I’ve found is super helpful figuring out why things aren’t working in pod, the visibility to effort ratio feels better to me than kubectl.

Disclaimer I work at vmware (but on a different team)

There's also https://infra.app which is really nice for a quick peek into the cluster.