It's really not that bad. Set up a Kubernetes cluster manually, then go set up a Nomad/Consul cluster manually, and you'll see that while just Nomad and Consul is much simpler, you haven't really gotten where you need to be unless you plan on having each of your clients to make separate DNS SRV requests beforehand AND have client-side load balancing. If you want that to be handled transparently for you, you're going to need some kind of virtualized networking or service mesh. You get this out of the box with Kubernetes, and in practice you don't need to set up these clusters manually. That's only valuable to help you understand each of the components better.
tl;dr both fully managed (GKE, EKS) or semi-automated (kops) Kubernetes deployments are less operationally expensive than the "simpler" alternatives. If you think Docker in general isn't worth it relative to just VMs...than you may be right for your use case. But I and many others will tell you that they've migrated from VM based environments to Kubernetes and it's done a lot to reduce operational overhead and increase productivity.
> Docker in general isn't worth it relative to just VMs...
Thats not what I think. I have load balancing, autoscaling, health and update management with AWS ECS just fine, using just a couple of Cloudformation templates, each is a fixed text file. Two files with parameters is all I need :)
Nuff said