Anecdotally, I was part of an organization that was all in on Beanstalk (hundreds of apps) that did a full migration to Kubernetes and we ended up reducing our spend, deploy times and pipeline complexity by half. We're talking a total yearly cloud spend probably near 9 digits. Moving to Kubernetes vastly simplified our lives and developers were able to learn it pretty easily. Development team was in the low hundreds.

So for every story I hear about "it was better back then", I just remember how much it was a horror for us and find it really hard to believe people voicing these options are actually arguing in good faith.