No, in fact we've gone running towards it after some initial success, especially when combined with ArgoCD for CD and Istio as a service mesh. My company has a lot of experience with running applications on VMs and Amazon's ECS. Our VM automation ultimately became expensive to maintain and ECS had its own set of issues I could probably fill up a blog post with.

From the Operations side, Kubernetes is scary. It's easy to screw things up and you can definitely run into problems. I understand why folks who work mostly on that side of the house are put off by the complexity of Kubernetes.

However, from the application side of things, our developers have been THRILLED with Kubernetes. For most developers my company provides a nice paved road experience with minimal customization required. For advanced use cases, we allow developers to use the Kubernetes API (along ArgoCD + GateKeeper policies) as a break glass type of approach. Istio gives the infra team the ability to easily move services between clusters and make policy changes easily. It also allows us to make use of Knative, although I think the Istio requirement is no longer there.

That said, you should be using managed Kubernetes wherever possible and not running your own clusters. That's where trouble lurks.