Managing Kubernetes without losing your cool

I could not imagine my day to day workflows without tools like kubectx/krew/k9s.

What I think the author doesn't really touch upon is how much of a revolution GitOps has been for Kubernetes. I've watched it grow from idea to stable implementation and in 99.9% of cases if you are using Kubernetes but not doing GitOps (preferably via FluxCD or ArgoCD) I know exactly the sort of mess I'm going to find in your clusters and organisation.

Kyverno is also another tool that has quickly become indispensable. What's not so obvious about it is you can lean on it for all the things you'd lean on bash in a typical non-k8s/non-cloud-native infra. It can be used as the de facto Kubernetes duct tape, not just for policies.

Regular VMs are still a great and simple solution to many, many, many deployment scenarios.

The same can be said for pretty much any shiny tool (FaaS, Rust, React, GraphQL, etc). These tools are sometimes the right solution, but they sometimes aren't.