Adopting k8s for our 2-people startup early on was a huge win: as this tech isn't likely to get superseded anytime soon, we invested happily into CI/CD and logging & monitoring pipelines on it. We have ~daily release cycles now with a very low count of user-affecting mistakes.
We definitely would have skipped this investment with other low-tech (scp) or proprietary tech stacks (ecs, ebs, etc).