Kubernetes in a sense is very similar to Linux back in the 2000s - it was nascent technology in a hot market that was still absolutely evolving. The difference now is that everyone knows the battle for the next tier of the platform is where people will be able to sell their value (look at RedHat selling to IBM for the saddled legacy of maintaining an OS as a tough growth proposition). For a while people thought that Hadoop would be the platform but it never grew to serve a big enough group's needs back in 2013-ish and coupled with the headaches of configuration management containerization hit and it's now combined at the intersection of OS, virtualization, CI, and every other thing people run applications on in general. It may be the most disruptive thing to our industry overall since the advent of Linux in this respect (people thought virtualization was it for a while and it's shown to have been minor comparatively).

A lot of this stuff really is trying to address the core problem we've had for a long time that probably won't ever end - "works fine on my computer."