"Just use Packer, some AMIs, some ASGs, some CF templates, some ELBs, some EC2 instances!"
No thanks: I'll Terraform an EKS cluster in 30 lines of HCL and deploy my applications with a Dockerfile and a handful of YAML files.
Yeah, this is where it kicked in for me. Never mind the fact that all of that is AWS specific and absolutely doesn't help you if you ever move clouds. Great to know all the stuff below, but Kubernetes is a wonderful abstraction layer above that stuff, and it gets better every day.
CF could have become Kubernetes -- it was supposed to be, but it just never got the mixture right (and of course is AWS exclusive).
Yes. I would agree to your statement precisely as an answer to @jen20.
Some things such as getting stateful systems, HPAs and persistent storages were a little tricky initially but a breeze after.
But I do want to mention that you really really need a team to look after it. Without it, it'll bound to be another snowflake.
[edit]: <sigh/> i meant to say stateful when i wrote stateless.
Kubernetes attempts to do all of the above, which is why it's so massive, and I'd argue it's actually less complex than knowing all the tools above -- but it's an equal degree less universally applicable. In this way, it's perfect for the dev who never wants to "do ops", and less so for the dev that already knows ops (or any regular sysadmin/ops person), because they already know all these answers.