Gitops and a local dev story are more about your application than your deployment environment. Especially because along the way you need to consider building, testing, CI, etc.

It's really hard to fault k8s these days, all the original problems are solved and all that remains is necessary complexity that can't be abstracted without lowering power.

That doesn't mean you can't abstract over it, you can and should but you should do so in the scope of your team or organisation where you already know which pieces of power you need/want or otherwise know the way you which you want to leak those capabilities.