When I started in software development, I was mostly working on monoliths. All dependencies were vendored or were expected to be dynamically linked on the system where they were deployed.

Next, I started working with Docker and languages with better package management. Dependencies were fetched in CI and were either statically linked or packaged in a container with the application I was working on. Still, these were mostly monoliths or applications with simple API boundaries and a known set of clients.

In the past few years, almost everything I have written has involved cloud services, and when I deploy an application, I do not know what other services may soon depend on the one I just wrote. This type of workflow that depends on runtime systems that I do not own - and where my app may become a runtime dependency of someone else - is what I am referring to as a "modern development workflow".

Not sure about the GP, but for me, it's a pretty big difference jumping from tools like docker to ones like buildah, microk8s— I feel like k8s really makes good on many of the original promises of the "container revolution" in terms of automatic provisioning/scaling/image lifecycle management, declaratively defining relationships between containers, adding a much needed upper layer of abstraction in terms of the pod, etc.

I know docker has made it part of the way there over the years with Compose and so on, but it's all felt pretty ad-hoc, whereas k8s feels like a cohesive system designed against a clear vision (which makes sense, since it was designed as borg 2.0)— no one else working in this space had the benefit of having already built a giant system for it and used it at scale for years beforehand.