Maybe I’m way off, but aren’t all of those things required for k8s? Ingress controllers, etcd cluster, terraform modules, storage configuration, etc...

I guess if you pay for a hosted service a lot of the control plane is taken care of.

I’ve used k8s in orgs where it’s a great fit and really fills a need, but it is considerably more complex than running a web service balanced across a couple of machines, and it definitely requires a lot more upfront complexity (as in, you have to solve problems before you have they are actually problems).