The overhead might get smaller but it never disappears. You'll still have maintenance and debugging issues that are specific to k8s.

True, but it also takes away some pain you'd otherwise have. I used to be in the 'Kubernetes is unnecessary overhead for most cases' camp, but since I actually started to use it I think it's a good base for even smaller setups, and I find myself prefering it to other ways of reproducably setting up infrastructure/services. Maybe that's not the case for the people posting here, but often times it seems people who argue against Kubernetes have never really used it and don't have more than a shallow knowledge.

Its hard to put into words without writing a blog post, but in my mind the 'everything is a resource' design introduces a simplicity that counterbalances the complexity that comes with it. One still has to make an informed decision, of course, and sometimes it really is not the right tool ...

This is exactly my experience.

For years I bemoaned that it doesn't scale down to the scale where most engineers work. I was wrong about that, it didn't scale down to the amount of learning I was willing to do for any one project at the scale I was doing them.

SOOO many times have I had to try to make my tools do something they weren't really capable of doing. And while it feels like a win today it never does tomorrow.

With Kubernetes most of my issues come from other things than that itself. Digital Ocean has a great small scale experience. AWS EKS has been quite a mess in comparison in terms of Ops time required. This made me realize that maybe people are suffering with ineffifcenies from the cloud provider, not Kubernetes itself.