As an old school IT professional, I would recommend considering most of these companies' advice "how not to engineer reliability".
Where I work the classic on-prem bare metal and ESX based systems are just massively more reliable than on-prem or cloud Kubernetes, and take far less people to operate. 3 or 4 9’s is easy with ESX and 5 is do-able. Kubernetes barely makes it into 1 9 and might not even do that! Still it employs a lot of engineers, and they probably get paid more than the crusty old ESX guys too! From that point of view you should definitely push for it.
Indeed. Not that you should, but you could leave an ESXi cluster running without maintaining it at all, and it'll probably keep going for five or ten years all on it's own. It's stable by design.
Where I work the classic on-prem bare metal and ESX based systems are just massively more reliable than on-prem or cloud Kubernetes, and take far less people to operate. 3 or 4 9’s is easy with ESX and 5 is do-able. Kubernetes barely makes it into 1 9 and might not even do that! Still it employs a lot of engineers, and they probably get paid more than the crusty old ESX guys too! From that point of view you should definitely push for it.