No path for busy people, unfortunately. Learn everything from ground up, from containers to Compose to k3s, maybe to kubeadm or hosted. Huge abstraction layers coming from Kubernetes serve their purpose well, but can screw you up when anything goes slightly wrong on the upper layer.

For start, ignore operators, ignore custom CSI/CNI, ignore IAM/RBAC. Once you feel good in the basics, you can expand.

k3sup a cluster, ask an AI on how to serve an nginx static site using trafeik on it and explain every step of it and what it does (it should provide: a config map, a deployment, a service and an ingress)

k3s provides: csi, cni (cluster storage interface, cluster network interface) which is flannel and and local-pv which just maps volumes to disk (pvcs)

trafeik is what routes your traffic from the outside to inside your cluster (to an ingress resource)