Then it breaks.
Except this breaks less than a homegrown solution would with 100,000x less effort fix, build or maintain.
It's a full time position keeping all the plates spinning in their air, but now It's even harder to debug and reason about. I guess it allows you to quickly start up a new project with some boilerplate configurations though. I wonder if there's a term for that, where you defer things perceived to be "hard" to save time up front. Sort of like a credit card you spend but with technical decisions ...
What does that even mean? Where? Across the entire industry? In specific companies? Empirically how much “more resources”?
Conversely you could ask: if k8s is so terrible and building your own version is so simple, why is the market not doing that?
Everywhere I’ve seen that uses k8s does indeed have full time Devops/platform people, but the ratio to the developers they support is far, far lower than homegrown platforms, as is the time to implement new requirements.
Usually these homegrown solutions get to a specific point in time where there isn’t the internal knowledge to maintain them, and the effort required grows too large. At which point they stagnate. Building on a stagnant, homegrown platform that you don’t know how to improve is not great.