I use kubernetes for pushing stuff to AWS EKS, and it is great. The problem I found with minikube and other Kubernetes based "alternatives" to Docker Desktop (including podman) is that they are not compatible with Docker Compose. There are a * a lot * of "solved problems" via docker-compose.yml files, and all of my past companies have used it. I've tried some docker-compose to k8s migration tools, but the amount of crap files they generate was not feasible for me.