I'm a fellow geriatric and have seen the wheel turn many times. I would like to point out, though, that most cycles bring something new, or at least make different mistakes, which is a kind of progress.

A lot of times stuff gets added to simple systems because they're thought to be necessary for production systems, but as our experience grows we realize those additions were not necessary, were in the right direction but not quite right, were leaky abstractions, etc. Then when the 4-year-experienced Senior Developers reinvent the simple solution, they get stripped out - which is a good thing. When the new simple system inevitably starts to grow in complexity, it won't include the cruft that we now know was bad cruft.

Freeing the new system to discover its own bad cruft, of course. But maybe also some new good additions, which we didn't think of the first time around.

I'm not a Kubernetes expert, or even a novice, so I have no opinions on necessary and unnecessary bits and bobs in the system. But I have to think that container orchestration is a new enough domain that it must have some stuff that seemed like a good idea but wasn't, some stuff that seemed like a good idea and was, and lacks some things that seem like a good idea after 10 years of working with containers.