Honestly the last time I looked at k8s was like 5 years ago, but back then it looked like a pretty big pita to admin.
It is a completely different world that stretches far beyond Kubernetes, though I attribute much of the change to what has happened from / around k8s -> cncf
It's so easy, I can launch production level clusters is 15 minutes with four keystrokes and make backups and restore to new ephemeral clusters with a few more simple commands
https://github.com/hofstadter-io/jumpfiles
(I'll be pushing these updates this weekend, haven't slept in 24 hours as reworked everything to be powered by https://cuelang.org )
- well it's also a pita to update services without a downtime. - and it sucks to update operating systems without a downtime. - sometimes you reinvent the wheel, when you add another service or even a new website
however with k8s everything above is kinda the same, define a yaml file, apply it, it works.
and also k8s itself can be managed via ansible/k3s/kops/gke/kubeadmin/etc... it's way easier to create a cluster and manage it.