I have been saying this to my customers for a long time, most projects do not really benefit from K8s but on the contrary, it is a huge operational/cost compromise to use K8s for a monolith app that does simple CRUD operations where occasional downtime is actually acceptable.
In my last project, I removed the unnecessary complexity that K8s was bringing and went back to ansible scripts, which has worked nicely.
With another customer, we inherited a frontend application that was being deployed with K8s while vercel is a considerably simpler/faster alternative.
K8s certainly has its advantages but I'd bet that many projects using it do not gain much.
My impression is that it makes deploying your 100th server much easier, at the cost of making your first several much harder. If you're going to have 100+ servers, that's probably worth it. If you're not (and most companies aren't), then it's like getting your CDL so that you can go to the grocery store in a semi-tractor trailer, when you should have driven there in a compact car.
In my last project, I removed the unnecessary complexity that K8s was bringing and went back to ansible scripts, which has worked nicely.
With another customer, we inherited a frontend application that was being deployed with K8s while vercel is a considerably simpler/faster alternative.
K8s certainly has its advantages but I'd bet that many projects using it do not gain much.