I'd be very interested to hear in what way you think GKE is nicer to work with, care to elaborate?

Clusters come up faster. They're easier to upgrade. Don't have to delete clusters to change them (just provision a new node pool). Persistent storage is less weird. No RBAC. Weirdness around kube-system namespace. I.e. if I create a registry there, it gets disappears with no logs or events suggesting why.