It's possible that many people (like me) had been trying to solve a similar non-business problem for years, including rolling our own solutions and the like, and when an open source option widely backed emerged and looked like a possible standard, we accept some warts in exchange for a broad, general purpose, flexible, automatable, and well-thought out (yes) solution.

Of course K8s is not perfect, and it's overkill for small to medium apps (I think hype train convinced a lot of people they would need to scale to massive cloud levels when really they didn't), but if you have ever needed K8s (especially for a complex microservice system at big enterprise level) then you know the value and you remember the proprietary vendor-locked era of sadness before K8s emerged.