This isn't some ageist kids-these-days thing, I mean that the complexity has always existed, and it's always abstracted one level higher over time. Kubernetes doesn't exist because Google and Google-adjacent engineers wanted to foist off "ooh, shiny" on the world, it exists because it solves a problem with containers at scale. Containers solve a problem with resource usage at scale, which are really just an evolution of VMs and a response to their inefficient resource usage and brittleness at scale, and even they were once seen as the new hot fancy overly-complicated thing.
For context, I entered the IT workforce just as virtual machines were being introduced into the average enterprise, and a distressingly high amount of the complaints I hear about containers and k8s were being used against VMs as well.
I'm curious to see where we go from k8s. What the next level of abstraction up will be.