I've been in cloud / IT space for about 15ish years now, and at some point in the last few years I became quite jaded with all the new shiny tech things. I had a lot of trouble buying into the K8s ecosystem when I could do magical wonderous things with SSH and Ansible, and most conversations with my colleagues at the time were unconvincing at best - they would say K8s can do blah blah, and I would point to our Ansible playbooks that were already doing the same thing. The problem for me was less about the differences in technology but more about finding the willingness to learn something just because I have to.

I've since learned to recontextualize these things in terms of people. CI/CD isn't good because it's better than SSH, it's good because people who speak English can understand a simple devops pipeline but not my custom SSH wizardry. It's a way of inviting developers and even non-tech mgmt folks into my arcane world of development / production and allowing them to see what's going on under the hood. My incentive now isn't about what CI/CD tech is better or worse, rather does it allow my team / peers to understand what I'm trying to achieve and join in. And ultimately that's what I get paid to do - I don't get paid to do cool tech stuff, I get paid to make other people's work easier, or at least that's how I see devops / CI/CD. I know I can always find easier ways to do things, but will they necessarily understand them?

Just my 2 cents. Hope this helps.