> I feel like this was more of a hyberbolic rant.

Reasonable--it definitely is a bit of a rant. I'm not sure it's hyperbolic, personally, but clearly I have a bias.

Overall, my acute frustration with k8s coming from a native-destkop-development background is I simply don't have the scaffolding to be effective relatively quickly. The learning curve is steep enough that I get discouraged before I actually begin making progress on my own goals, and I just feel like I'm trying to do things The Right Way, without understanding what I'm doing, or why, or actually accomplishing my original goals.

As you said, this is true of concepts I've had to learn in the past, but I could learn all those concepts in isolation, then apply them together. K8s I feel like I have to understand a much larger chunk of before I hit critical mass and can start being effective.

i.e. python, I can start with, like, sqlite, before I move to an external hosted DB. K8s I feel like I have to understand waaaay more components--and they don't directly build. Like Docker-compose _seems like_ a stepping stone to k8s, but I've been told is a false path.

From overview vantage point, YAML-files seems to be stepping stone to even better abstractions. Operators maybe? The orchestration is complex work in itself, and to build up to more advanced setups you need incremental work, or simplifications. In orgs K8s tends to require a separate team.