I left the IT industry last year and have found myself in the education sector. I can't speak into your future but I do recollect sharing some of your frustrations as a sysadmin of 20 years. k8s felt to me like whack a mole. I was old school. I created relationships with the right people in our datacenters. My team shipped and deployed our own bare metal servers. Ansible was great for deploying VMs. Then came along k8s.

I was happy with our freebsd servers doing zfs and nfs. I was a fan of nginx as a proxy server on linux. I got redis. Mongo came and went. It wasn't rocket science to put failover services on different hardware and in different datacenters.

I would rather have a collection of small parts making up a complex solution than the complexity of k8s.

I have gotten a lot of mileage out of freebsd jails and lxc on ubuntu down through the years. I am a fan of containers. I agree with you that people use k8s for deployments which really don't need it. Unfortunately this is the world of IT; new toys and, "na, na, I know something you don't".

I moved to education as I decided I didn't want to be responsible for an IT infrastructure anymore. My new job is equally difficult but does not require the same out of hours headspace as looking after a global network.