The time intensive phase during the first Kubernetes deployment is changing the mindset of the engineering team and everyone involved in IT.
Kubernetes IMHO is pretty much like moving from college into work life and adapting to the fact that requirements for a decent adult life are very much different from a college life.
One might reasonably expect "everything" to include traditional deployment methods that require no changing of mindsets (not that that's likely a factor in my nascent startup example).
Think being a startup where deployments most likely will be manual and undocumented, upgrading to an initial automation using some scripting, transitioning to CI/CD, etc.
So from various experiences at companies of all sizes I would actually support such a broad claim, since companies are basically transitioning all the time through new phases to greener pastures. That of course assumes that the company values constant improvements and uses an iterative process for growth and change.
If you have an existing production which works well after years of improvement and stabilization, with people with a lot of expertise on it, you won't get that in 2 months, not the stability and quality nor the ability to troubleshoot it.
Startups start from scratch, don't have big workloads, also there isn't so much pressure to have a high quality service from day one because you don't have that much people consuming your services.
It's certainly in line with technical new hire productivity "ramp up" time estimates (typically 3 months?), which I would guess are a similar (if individual) case of change-of-mindset.
Are you asserting that any modern production environment that takes less than 2 months to set up is bound to cause problems? Or the whole company/startup/project?
If the former, I'd say there are many tech startups who would disagree, or at the very least, point out that it doesn't matter because they'd cease to exist during those 2 months without an MVP in production.