I really don't understand how this point isn't more widely acknowledged. k8 expertise is expensive. I'm seeing companies jump in head-first without doing any cost-benefit analysis, and winding up in some really difficult situations.
First mover advantage. And when the recession hits you fire them and your pipeline should be mostly automated by then... The rest is still paying full monolithic big servers. And slow deployments.
The bit about significant care may be true in on-prem installations, I don't know, but GKE for example is pretty darn bulletproof. As for upgrades, they do come along frequently and you don't want to get too far behind. Rolling nodepools has made the process a lot less labor and time intensive for us.
Tell me you are saving money after you hire them :)