It's actually fun to see this. Running systems in a lot of different ways are just interesting. I do however get kinda sad at the hate at k8s because it's really good at what it does.

I've seen so many projects bending over backwards to avoid k8s and pay large cloud bills to avoid it at all costs. (ECS and app services are hopelessly expensive and bothersome)

K8s is really good, pretty easy to maintain, but a bit hard to understand. Mostly because distributed, zero down time systems are a bit hard to get by nature. But if you have someone that wants to take it on I've managed k8s clusters, solo, without incident, while doing lots of other stuff too (working with larger teams now though). Not to mention there's a lot of competence out there that can take over if I'd move on. Most of the deep complexity comes with more advance use cases, that wont show up for smaller deployments.

That said, no h8 towards going your own way! If your a solo developer (or small team) for a smallish project, don't feel the absolute need. If you get to the point you need it you should be earning enough to start paying someone to help ya get your app to a distributed system like k8s.

I think it's good to invest the time in understanding k8s though as a professional. Even if you won't directly run it it teaches you a lot about how to think about distributed, zero downtime systems. And what requirements that puts on an app.