Frankly K8 reminds me more J2EE EJB 2.X. Horrific complexity that provides not that much after all.
Almost everything that gets advertised about it I have mostly seen it first on application servers.
Kubernetes clearly, obviously and rather openly IS the application server of the current decade. I am saying this as a dev who has seen up close: OpenShift, Kubernetes, Tomcat and enterprise WebSphere.
Now you can have all this complexity even in other languages than Java.
Hence why it is a fad, in about two years we will be getting the Spring/EJB 3.0 of Kubernetes, when enough people just get fed up with its complexity.
It's more way more then two. If you pick kubernetes you now have N problems (helm, istio, kustomize, etcd, kubeform, ...)