Ah, but is it? I'm not sure. One difference between these platforms is that they're very optimized for the "typical app deployment" process, whereas Ansible and such are more generic.

Just getting a simple deployment script in Ansible requires programming a bunch of steps - copying archive, verifying it, unpacking it, then atomically configuring the system to use the new version, finally cleaning it up - whereas with k8s you just let it know you want to Deploy something and it does.

Of course, that's only true if you already know k8s, but then again if you work with both toy and larger projects, chances are you'll have to, sooner or later.