To be fair: using Kubernetes anyways builds the skill just in case you become one of the 0.1% who actually need it down the line.
K3S takes about 5 minutes to setup the first time and you instantly have an entire universe of standardized operational tooling. I wouldn't touch docker compose with a 20 foot pole for production work.
Setting up K8s isn't rocket science, but maintaining it are offputting, to say the least.
Which is exactly what is happening with us, too bad we didn't choose K8S from the get-go and stuck with a "simpler" tool (gaining very little in the process).
This shittake was probably valid 10y ago, I would have agreed with you back then
> The entire infra the vast majority of Kubernetes users have could run on a single bare metal machine
Where are you pulling this out of? A large number of k8s users don't need it, but the alternative you have sounds hyperbolic.
I wouldn't say my career is out of the ordinary, however most software I've built/maintained need more than one host.