A lot of comments here about the complexity. But a takeaway from the article is that driving a car is different from repairing it.

We are a startup, had zero knowledge of k8s before. Without GKE, we would have lost days and days of work to imitate parts of k8s on VMs.

Scaling up and down, everything as a container (even cron jobs. Otherwise we had to keep a vm running and use some scheduler). GKE has been a massive advantage for us. The complexity bits may be true for someone managing a k8s cluster. Even with just 3-4 services, managing everything as cattle has been amazing.