This is the thing I think most people miss when they complain about the complexity of Kubernetes. If you already know how to use standard sysadmin tools it looks like a lot of additional knowledge to achieve similar outcomes. These people seem to forget that there is a lot of complexity in their sysadmin tools too.

Do you really thing you can set up and run a Kubernetes cluster, even a small one, without significant understanding of standard sysadmin tooling? I know a fair bit, and I didn't find it easy.

Absolutely. I set one up from scratch on a cluster of Raspberry Pis and I don't know shit about Packer, Ansible, SystemD, and probably a bunch of things I'm only nominally familiar with. And that was a bare metal cluster, and it was hard; however, I don't think it was hard for lack of sysadmin knowledge, it was hard because I was learning K8s, I had to learn about ingres and MetalLB, K8s requires you to modify cgroups things that I don't know shit about, various RPI/docker/architecture tedium, and other K8s particularities that aren't "standard sysadmin" things. More importantly, as the original article mentioned, cloud providers do this setup for you for an affordable price so you absolutely don't need to know the standard sysadmin things.

If you, or somebody available to you, doesn't know standard sysadmin things, you shouldn't be deploying a production system. When things inevitably do go wrong, you'll need that sysadmin knowledge to get things sorted out.

But here we're talking about personal projects. That's how a lot of people learn exactly what production systems take.

You certainly can, but you need to find that one easy way to do it, that only appears obvious in hindsight.