This read as "old man yells at cloud" to me.

I've managed a few thousand VMs in the past, and I'm extremely grateful for it. An image is built in CI, service declares what it needs, the scheduler just handles shit. I'm paged significantly less and things are predictable and consistent unlike the world of VMs where even your best attempt at configuration management would result in drift, because the CM system is only enforcing a subset of everything that could go wrong.

But yes, Kubernetes is configured in YAML, and YAML kind of sucks, but you rarely do that. The thing that changes is your code, and once you've got the boilerplate down CI does the rest.