If you want to do insfrastructure innovation you are more than welcome to. There are lots of engineers dedicated to it. Its also not that hard to go from software engineer to infrastructure engineer thus bringing your experiece and unique perspective. But working at a SMB or startup (the 90%) doesn't justify innovation for innovations sake. 1 acre of corn doesn't justify inventing the combine.

The way to enable fast ops evolution is by creating a small bubble with either a mutable facade or the immutability restrictions disabled, and go innovate there. Once you are ready, you can port the changes to the overall environment.

And the way to do the thing the article complains about is with partial deployments.

Both of those are much better behaved on a large-scale ops than the small-scale counterparts. K8s kinda "supports" both of them, but like almost everything in k8s, it's more work, and there are many foot-guns.