> These servers were difficult to maintain, monitor, upgrade etc and a number of solutions were developed by system administrators to work with them. It all though felt very cumbersome

There’s a lot of irony saying this about bare metal vis-à-vis k8s. Maintaining individual servers isn’t difficult, doing it at scale with high availability and the requirement of upfront investment (hardware, colo, staffing, etc.) is. Doing k8s at scale isn’t a walk in the park or a cheap date either, though.