Whilst I often agree with you that we're a hype driven machine that more than often just creates more work for ourselves, I actually think kubernetes is an improvement over tying an app directly to EC2.

Obviously I imagine you know other tools better and it depends how you do it, but kube gives you a lot more by default. Arguably more importantly, I can lift and shift kubernetes and put it in any cloud or on-premise. I'm not really sure what the benefit of running a VMs would give you, other than possibly live migrations.