Docker is not for production. Nomad at scale in practice needs a lot of load-bearing Bash scripts around it: for managing certs, for external DNS, you need Consul for service discovery, Vault for secrets.
At that point, is Nomad still simple? If you're going to take on all of the essential complexity of deploying software at scale, just do it right and use Kubernetes.
Source: running thousands of containers in production.
Kubernetes uses etcd for service discovery. It isn't that Nomad does things differently or less simply, it is just that they are more explicit about it.
The real difference is that Kubernetes has a wide array of cloud hosts that hide the complexity from users, whereas Nomad can realistically be self hosted
I'm not saying that Kubernetes isn't complex, I'm saying it's a fallacy to claim that the Hashicorp stack in any way manages to be less complex in practice. All of these moving parts are unavoidable if you want to run software at scale, Kubernetes is just way better engineered than the Hashicorp stack, if only for not depending on dockerd.
At that point, is Nomad still simple? If you're going to take on all of the essential complexity of deploying software at scale, just do it right and use Kubernetes.
Source: running thousands of containers in production.