This is an insightful article. A learning for me was how the author managed to switch multiple cloud providers even while being a one man SAAS.
Kubernetes is overwhelming because of 2 things: Overload of terminology, and Distributed systems day 2 operations.
Author succeeds so well because he has a starter stack (install, CI pipeline, secure, monitor, scale) maintained as code, and it works every time.
For someone starting new, the learning curve is high. Bootstrapping is easy, but day 2 on kubernetes is hard. Benefits outweigh is learning curve imho.
Specific to DigitalOcean kubernetes API server issues, we have rolled out some resource provisioning improvements for newly created clusters very recently. Also making ongoing improvements to backend monitoring.