I have had a similar experience. It's certainly easily to grok the architecture when it's traditional and simple, but it's significantly more work when every app follows a different pattern (which tends to happen in bespoke infrastructure). I've done both and while I agree with the gp that k8s is overkill for a lot of apps, there's still a lot of value in having patterns and consistency. When you can go from Service A to Service B and know that it's laid out similar, the cognitive overhead of managing several or dozens of services goes way down.