The most freeing moment with k8s for me was integrating that no, you don't need to write all that YAML (or JSON), and going into generating manifests from other formats - in my case, usually Jsonnet with mix of libraries both public and private which quickly embedded knowledge specific to our setup.

I think one of the best things I ever heard from another colleague was "I took the example jsonnet and had working version for completely new deployment within hour" :)