> but back then it looked like a pretty big pita to admin

- 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.