Most providers at this point offer ephemeral containers or serverless functions.
Does a product focused, non infra startup even need k8s? In my honest opinion people should be using Cloud Run. It’s by far Google’s best cloud product.
Anyway, going back to the article - k8s is hard if you’re doing hard things. It’s pretty trivial to do easy things using k8s, which only leads to the question - why not use the cloud equivalents of all the “easy”things? Monitoring, logging, pub/sub, etc. basically all of these things have cloud equivalents as services.
The question is, cost aside, why use k8s? Of course, if you are cost constrained you might do bare metal, or a cheaper collocation, or maybe even a cheap cloud like DigitalOcean. Regardless, you will bear the cost one way or another.
If it were really so easy to use k8s to productionize services to then offer as a SaaS, everyone would do it. Therefore I assert, unless those things are your service, you should use the cloud services. Don’t use cloud vms, use cloud services, and preserve your sanity. After all, if you’re not willing to pay someone else to be oncall, that implies the arbitrage isn’t really there enough to drive the cost down enough for you to pay, which might imply it isn’t worth your time either (infra companies aside).