I think you've hit on the major issue with the "anti-hype" around kubernetes and related products: they're not something you need, per se, to develop an app. They are something you need to manage multiple parallel development processes.
For devs stuck in a silo it's a little like putting margarine on butter. For DevOps looking at hundreds of little silos it's the foundation of operational sanity.
Re:The Kubernetes Effect
by mikkergimenez on Monday February 12, 2018 @11:48AM
(#16359841)
To sort of echo what you're saying, most of these articles seem to suggest that containers solve a technical problem. More often then not I've seen them as a solution to an organizational problem.
One day I spun up a k8s cluster on GKE and just started putting all projects there. This cluster enabled huge cost savings (running a fleet of 3 VM's instead of ~50), allowed cheap per-feature dev/staging environments, forced developers to consider horizontal scaling BEFORE we needed to scale (read: when we missed our only shot), and overall reduced ops workload tenfold. It wasn't without a few challenges of its own, but I would never go back.