Hot take: if people spent half the energy doing multi-region that they today spend screwing around with Kubernetes, they’d be a hell of a lot more reliable.
For larger teams having a well defined API that delineates applications from infrastructure that doesn't require extreme specialist knowledge (it still requires some specialist knowledge but vastly less than direct manipulation of resources via something like Terraform) is a massive productivity boost.
Of course none of that matters if you have 4 developers like OP but for folks like myself that routinely end up at places with 300+ engineers then it's a huge deal.
I think this is the first time I've heard somebody say one of the benefits of kubernetes was productivity.
Fargate with auto-scaling plus Aurora for the DB is pretty great in terms of a nearly zero-maintenance setup that can handle just about any type of service up to massive scale.
Unfortunately getting all the networking and IAM stuff right is still pretty thorny if you want to do things the correct way and not just run it all in public subnets. And the baseline costs are significantly higher than a paas.
Disclaimer: I've never actually used it myself. That's mostly just what I've read and heard from people who use kubernetes.
I am not an ops guy.
Of course, this quickly stops working once your small projects grow to have multiple collaborators, a staging environment, etc. - but at that point you're running a proper business