Hi! Small tech company that uses k8s here. Much of the complexity is irreducible and has to go somewhere, and it's much better to have it in a single, stateless, well-defined place that's also easy too introspect.

I've seen way too many Ansible nightmares grown out of deceptively "simple" mutable VM deployments.

k8s makes our life so much easier because it eliminates a whole bunch of other complexity. Easily reproducible development environments, workload scheduling, sane config management...