If using k8s doesn't reduce the overall complexity of your system, then you probably don't need it. But not all systems are the same as yours.

I'm pretty sure the "kubernetes is hell" proponents were always just a vocal minority. But as always technology choices have to be made in the context of each business (available experience etc).

Modern CPUs are giant, complicated pieces of hardware. But they’re useful, and have a well defined interface that you can interact with it at a higher level.

Same with k8s. People conflated running k8s from scratch, with administrating. The former is very hard, you should buy it from a cloud provider. The latter is IMO not much harder than VMs at small scale and much simpler at you grow bigger.

Yes, let's compare CPUs that took literally decades to mature and there are a handful of companies that can design and manufacture them to K8s.

We don't want to run k8s from scratch? Let's buy the managed version in the cloud?

It sounds like an argument for containers.

I mean, at that point why not use a simpler abstraction, like a VM. Or just use functions.

What it is, is a low-level abstraction that probably wants something over the top of it to hide the messy details. I don't think anyone's really cracked that yet.