As with everything it's not black or white, but rather a spectrum. Sure, updating k8s is not that bad, but operating a distributed storage solution is no joke. Or really anything that requires persistence and clustering (like elastic).
You can also trade operational complexity for cash via support contracts and/or enterprise solutions (like just throwing money at Hitachi for storage rather than trying to keep Ceph alive).
If you don't need something crazy you can just grab what a lot of enterprises already had done for years, which is drop a few big storage servers and call it a day, connecting over iSCSI/NFS/whatever
If you are in Kubernetes land you probably want object storage and some kind of PVC provider. Not thaaat different from an old fashioned iSCSI/NFS setup to be honest, but in my experience different enough to cause friction in an enterprise setting. You really don't want a ticket-driven, manual, provisioning process of shares
a PVC provider is nice, sure, but depending on how much you need/want simplest cases can be "mount a subdirectory from common exported volume", and for many applications ticket-based provisioning will be enough.
That said on my todo-list is some tooling to make simple cases with linux NFS or SMI-capable servers work as PVC providers.
You can also trade operational complexity for cash via support contracts and/or enterprise solutions (like just throwing money at Hitachi for storage rather than trying to keep Ceph alive).