I see this sentiment a lot online, but k8s for us has been quite simple to learn and use and, like you acknowledged here, solved a lot of availability issues out of the box for us that we previously had to deal with in more manual ways. Better yet, it’s a standardized platform that we can use company-wide and that every engineer understands, including potential hires — that’s very valuable. I feel it has become a common trope to claim k8s is complicated and overkill but we are quite glad we made the move to using it.

Have you ever considered the workforce aspect of technologies? Like, you'll still need devops, and if you aren't at least dabbling in containers and elasticity, you're going to get the luddites.

Yes, though the GP made no reference to Kubes at all and was talking more generally about AWS.

AWS has an absolute tonne of great and not so great services but you can easily use the basic stuff to get quite simple and cost effective solutions. You can YOLO it on the console and not even worry about cloudformation if you want, and if you have no customers it will likely be free tier to boot.

Kubernetes was not mentioned by the comment I replied to, which was about AWS.

Even then, your founders might have made a bad business decision – which isn't unusual, and companies can often make bad business decisions, such as prioritising investment in scalability when it's not a required feature.

They can equally make good business decisions – such as rolling out a relatively standard technology like Kubernetes to gain the workflow and availability features, even though scalability is not required.

I agree that it is important to remember that sometimes "old-fashioned" approaches can be totally suitable for some use-cases, and they can be too often written off. But equally let's try not to assume that everyone who rolls out a particular modern technology stack is a gullible fool.