Your statement already support that without the blessings of engineering team of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Digital Ocean and various managed kubernetes service it's impossible for a reasonable small team to manage and monitor k8s and all of this service comes with lock-in and additional capital outlay.
Obviously for a Google Cloud Partner, more people are tied to gcp and kubernetes, higher the revenue. Its secondary if it's really necessary for an application to require k8s.
It's not. Take any simple web app and deploy it into managed GKE with Anthos and you automatically get SLI's and the ability to define SLO's for availability and latency with a nice wizard. Takes a few minutes to setup.
The amount of engineering needed to achieve good SLO monitoring dwarfs the engineering needed to run a simple app so it just never happened. That's no longer the case.
> Only when company is reaching google scale kubernetes make sense.
Also obviously not true given the number of companies deriving value from kubernetes.
Note, I'm a Google Cloud partner.