For a small shop you'll need one person knowing that stuff, or you bring in an external consultant for setting up and maintaining the cluster, or you move to some cloud provider (k8s is basically a commodity that everyone and their dog offers, not just the big 3!) so you don't have to worry about that at all.
And a cluster for basic stuff is not even that expensive if you do want to run your own. Three worker machines and one (or, if you want HA, two) NAS systems... half a rack and you're set.
The benefit you have is your engineers will waste a lot less time setting up, maintaining and tearing down development and QA environments.
As for the SO setup: the day-to-day maintenance of them should be fairly simple - but AFAIK they had to do a lot of development effort to get the cluster to that efficiency, including writing their own "tag DB".
Well but lets walk one step back looking at SO, they are a windows shop (.NET, MS SQL Server) so I doubt k8s would be found in their setup.
And I also argue, lack of experience of fiddling with redundant kubernetes is a more likely source of downtime than hardware failure and keeping things simple.