If you're expecting app/FE devs to have to learn it you're putting a ton of barriers in their way in terms of deploying. Just chucking a container on a non-k8s managed platform (e.g. Cloud Run) would be much simpler, and no pile of bash scripts.
Also, in my experience, you either have to spend ridiculous amounts of money on SaaS/PaaS, or you find that you have to host a lot more than just your application and suddenly the deployment story becomes more complex.
Depending on where you are and how much you're willing to burn money, you might find out that k8s experts are cheaper than the money saved by not going PaaS.
Why would anyone expect it? It's not their job, is it? We don't expect backend devs to know frontend and vice-versa, or any of them to have AWS certification. Why would it be different with k8s?
> Just chucking a container on a non-k8s managed platform (e.g. Cloud Run) would be much simpler, and no pile of bash scripts.
Simpler to deploy, sure, but not to actually run it seriously in the long term. Though, if we are talking about A container (as in singular), k8s would indeed be some serious over-engineering