This GitOps 'nonsense' gives me a well defined and automatically backuped infrastructure setup with audit build in. It doesn't allow someone to snowflake around which is brilliant and forces you and your colleges to manifest stuff and not forgetting it and degrading your system over time (nix and nixos are also great examples of such systems)
This reminds me of the time i learned html and wanted to set new lines all over a text instead of using proper paragraphs and letting html take care of the proper formatting.
I would like to see a better/stronger statefulset though. As long as this pod is alive, make sure its state is not interrupted. Like allow a pod to be migrated to another node.
Nonetheless, i'm in the middle of setting up kubernetes with kubeadm and cilium network. Its already really easy to do so. It will just get more easy and more stable over time and its already great.
When you look at the storage example: yes its more difficult then just using a hard drive. But you ignore the issue with one hard drive: Backup, checksum / bit rot and recovery. With a storage layer, you can actually increase replica count, you can backup ALL storage volumnes automatically.
the same with networking: With cilium you can now have a lightweight firewall with dns support.
It is much more critical for the whole industry to start rebuilding software to be more cloud/container native. This will reduce the pain points we have right now and will make it more resilient to operate. For example Jenkins: Instead of one big master, have a ha setup for your working queue, a pod for a dashboard and schedule workers on demand.
My personal conclusion: Don't use it, if you don't need it. If you need it, embrace the advantages.