The analogy doesn’t fit, because in spite of its complexity, Kubernetes won the orchestrator wars. So, as mentioned in another comment, Kubernetes is VHS: Developed by a vendor that was more interested in spreading it than locking it down and monetizing it, thus ensuring that it gathered support by other vendors. Other orchestrators are still being used, but they’re not the default option that most would know about. And that’s fine.

There’s no reason to believe Kubernetes will stop dominating the orchestration market. There’s going to be more pressure from existing vendors to make it cheaper, better easier to deploy and and less complex. Likewise with VHS, you could rent a VHS Player (MovieBox) along with a movie if you didn’t feed comfortable with the investment of a VCR.

What’s going to kill Kubernetes, if anything, is likely a move away from container orchestration to something else, where the Kubernetes resource model somehow isn’t a good fit.

Likewise, VHS didn’t lose dominance, the videotape market just became irrelevant. IBM still dominates mainframes, Windows NT++ still dominates office/workgroup servers, and VMware still dominates virtualization.