> which is 10-15x more complicated

You can learn k8s in a day. It's really simple.

> various ingress controllers and weird quirks that are completely different on each cloud provider

Which are thoroughly documented and not that hard to implement or understand. You'd be reading about each cloud's nonstandard ingress even without k8s.

The beauty of k8s is you can run your software locally and have a much easier time lifting and shifting to another cloud.

Fitting to the shape of a cloud provider is a great way to never leave.

Another benefit of k8s is that you treat your services as cattle you can easily spawn and kill. Adoption of k8s naturally leads to anti-fragility, anti-brittle best practices.