We adopted Kubernetes at our startup, it solved most ci/cd and devops issues for the team. We didn't need the scaling either, we have at max maybe 2 containers of a service but we know we are ready.
There are plenty of companies ou there that have old COTS lying around and require some sort of IT infrastructure. Being able to setup and manage a working cluster of COTS hardware is a great way to add computational resources to a company without spending au additional cash or having to rubber stamp permits.
I personally have done this in a previous job, and a small POC with minikube turned into a 3-node kubeadm cluster that deployed and managed two company-wide intranet services like a breeze. Zero cash was spent, the only resource used was a few hours of my time, everyone benefitted, and managers were very happy with the result.
Kubernetes knowledge is becoming an important job skill, and if your current employer does not use Kubernetes, you'll need to learn it on your own.
> Which IMO, most businesses don't even have a compelling reason to switch from the old 3 tier monolith architecture.
Compelling reasons include self-healing, autoscaling, and official support from all major cloud providers. In my experience, it's actually easier to adopt Kubernetes at a smaller company than a larger one.
It's also becoming harder to hire developers who are willing to work on monolithic codebases. It's been a while since those were the state of the art, and a lot of people with 5+ years in the industry have never seen them before.