My criticism of k8s is it's an absolutely batshit level of complexity[0] that somehow still fails to provide extremely basic functionality out-of-the-box (unless paired with a whole cloud provider ecosystem, but then why not just skip k8s and use ECS???). I don't think k8s solves real problems most developers face, but it does keep all these folks[1] getting paid, so I can see why they'd advocate for it.

Nomad is vastly superior in every way except for mindshare; Elastic Beanstalk or Dokku is superior for most normal-people use cases.

[0] https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/components/

[1] https://landscape.cncf.io/