However, an exciting thing to me is the Cambrian explosion of alternatives to docker: podman, nerdctl, even lima for creating a linux vm and using containerd on macos looks interesting.
Nomad is trying to be an orchestrator.
Kubernetes is trying to be an operating system for cloud environments.
since they aim for being different things they make different trade offs.
That said, you're going to be doing some plumbing for things like wiring your services together (Fabio/Consul Connect are good choices), detecting when to add more host machines, etc.
As far as how it compares to k8s, I don't know, I haven't used it materially yet.
How do you scale it, how do you manage it, how will it get deployed, all questions that go into the answer of what should go into it.