While Kubernetes definitely has its own failure modes and can be an utter pain in the ass to set up, in my experience it also removes significant failure modes and makes your life way easier.

For me, the most important thing is I don't have to take care in my deployment pipelines about how many servers I have and how they are named/reachable, to stop Docker containers, to re-create Docker containers, how to deal with logs, letsencrypt cert renewals... all I have to do is point kubectl at the cluster's master, submit the current specification on how the system should look like and I don't have to deal with anything else. If a server or a workload crashes, I don't have to set up monitoring to detect and fail over, Kubernetes will automatically take care of that for me. When I add capacity to the cluster for whatever reason, I enroll the new server with kubeadm and it's online - no entering of new backend IPs in reverse proxies, no bullshit. Maintenance (e.g. OS upgrades, hardware maintenance) becomes a breeze as well: drain the node, do the maintenance, start the node, everything works automatically again.