In fact the complain that you need to learn helm or networking or auth or CRDS is unfair. If you don't want all the goodness of helm you can do it the old fashioned way, ie creating your own docker container and using deployment.
But in practice perhaps my feeling is that if a tool/ecosystem has too many viable/competing ways to do things and/or it makes adding complexity too easy, the it does encourage devs to get way out their depth. That's less of a problem if it's some tiny service only they have to deal with, but a threat to the whole company if they're using a multimillion dollar company's uptime as their little playground.
That may be less of a criticism of kubernetes itself and more of the ecosystem/trend, but I still think it's relevant. I'd compare it to this - I have often found frontend intolerable not because the tools are bad, but because the rate-of-change of the "in" tools is so excessive.