I agree with you, I think K8s is great to learn so you know what it can do, but I wouldn't use it for personal projects. For that, I recommend something like Dokku, which is very easy to get started with.

For Kubernetes, I found the docs a bit bad, the starting concepts are very easy to grok but the docs obfuscate them. I wrote a very short article on the basics [0], for anyone who might be interested in learning. After reading the article, reading the docs should be much easier, as you'll know the terms much more intuitively.

[0]: https://www.stavros.io/posts/kubernetes-101/

> About complexity, what you're saying is true, but I think "once your cluster is running" is making a lot of assumptions about what is actually running in the cluster in terms of infra and what workloads you can run there.

Already answered in a way:

> Can this be automated? Sure, but I'd rather automate my cluster provisioning.

If I need more computational power or a specific 3rd-party service that I don't have available at this point, I simply tear down my current cluster and deploy it elsewhere.