My last gig was Kubernetes, and aside from all the hate it gets here, (You're not Facebook, you don't need Facebook scale) it was a very pleasant experience. So pleasant in fact that when I moved on to my next job (Amazon EC2 VMs) it was pretty painful. They were running an old version of Amazon Linux and hadn't been updated in years. The versions of some runtimes were impossible to update due to GLibc being out of date. Our immediate answer was, can we at least get to a Docker solution? ECS/Fargate provided a nice middle ground. But I'll admit. Once you start getting into running multiple replicas, it's nice to have the other stuff that Kubernetes affords you.
I pick Kubernetes because I want to manage software and not manage servers. I think it gets a lot of hate because people look at helm charts that are designed to support all possible software configurations and they are quite confusing. If you break it down to the basic pieces of configuration it's not really any more complicated than say a docker-compose file. Just a little more verbose.
Oh definitely. Helm/Kustomize.... Yamls all over the place. It can be awful. But then how nice it is to have a cluster with load balancing, a nice API Gateway, services spinning up and down gracefully. While that is certainly achievable in other ways, this one has been my favorite. (I used to deploy WARs to JBoss and have zero downtime... while it was possible, it was horrible)
