I don't see the point of your counterargument. For starters, there are plenty of managed containerized solutions that just run your containers without you ever having to bother with them. Secondly, it seems you got it entirely wrong: the point of pets vs cattle are the services, not the servers. You want to take your services down and put them up without surprises. Unless you're planning on rebooting your infrastructure just for shits and giggles, it makes no sense to talk about treating "servers" as pets, specially as you already get those as managed services just like you get VMs.

Behavioral patterns for a user are not tethered to one ephemeral implementation.

I ran a huge VMWare cluster in 3 data centers across the globe, not so different from an AWS/EKS pipeline.

Yes, I had to treat the hardware like pets to an extent. But the developers had no problem pivoting between VMWare and what we ran in AWS because the software tooling we provided looked the same.

Some folks believe memorizing YouTube videos = expertise.

You can always point out that pods are ran on nodes. Nodes use the standard built in GCP Auto-scaler (instance groups + load balancer). So its a great wrapper! But, it's a wrapper. GCP also! has a way to use a docker image as your VM.

This individual was shocked to learn I thought you could treat the iron-born servers as cattle too. (But, my first clusters were in the late 90s, so got to the cattle concept quite some time ago)