As a developer, I hate k8s, but mostly because my management does not understand difference between developers and devops. They changed our job titles to devops engineers and fired sys admins. I understand k8s is complex for people who specialize in it, try imagining as a developer, you need to setup private vlan ingress. At least, on regular Linux, I know how to setup ip tables or look up 1000s of tutorial.

K8s and devops has destroyed us developers' productivity, confidence, and morale.

Isn't it your management who have destroyed those things?

I don't disagree but I don't know where they are getting their marketing material where they think developers can do devops. I suspect it might some sales tactics from these Cloud/DevOps companies.

I wonder if some of the derision is at least due in part to k8s effectively forcing you to think about certain application characteristics upfront instead of addressing them later when you outgrow the single instance performance or suffer an outage.

I've never met a sysadmin that would prefer it over the bash scripts.

What's your sample size?

Having worked in FAANGs and a number of other large companies, I lost count.