Am I wrong when I say this type of opinion normally comes from infrastructure personal? I say that because I've never seen a standard so easy and seamless for a developer to get his code running.
You deploy using extremely long YAML files, your app interacts with a lot of complex software (secret storage, ingress controller etc) and accessing your app for debugging is very non-straightforward. Once you understand the concepts and stack it's great, but when you're coming from locally running your app or even docker, it's as opaque as it gets.
In my experience, it's actually worse for developers, because infra people are forced to learn k8s as direct part of their job, while for developers it's more of a sidenote.
If you don't need that easy scaling, then I don't think there is a need for k8s.
"deploy war" was pretty damn easy.
I'd want to deploy a k8s infrastructure, but have an easy experience on top for developers that might not maximize k8s use initially, but allow devs to move down a layer eventually. The whole time the ops folks would be running k8s and limited layer above that'd keep devs in a particular lane.
Isn't this feasible?
A few individual components that try to bring back the ease of rapid/easy deploys include: Flux, Tilt, Argo, kapp-controller.
They all have slightly different priorities and make different compromises, but anyways just to assure you there's quite a few people trying to build and sell the layer you're describing.
Docker Compose is a breeze compared to Kubernetes.