Sure, you pay someone else to keep k8s alive, it's not so bad, but it's expensive to do that. You generally need a full-time team of people to keep a k8s deployment alive if you are running it yourself.

I keep Nomad alive part-time. It's operationally simple and easy to wrap ones head around it and understand how it works.

A lot of the cloud providers don't bill directly for kubernetes management, instead it's just the node resources.

Either way, as another comment points out, Rancher and many other solutions make the orchestration of creating your own Kubernetes cluster really boring.

We run a few kubernetes clusters on premise, and for the longest time it was just 1 person running some Kubernetes clusters.. we even have other teams in QA/Engineering running their own with it.

Which cloud providers don't? I'm only familiar with AWS and GCP, and they both have a base hourly charge per-cluster.

Azure as far as I know doesn't have base charges unless you want a paid SLA, It's Azure though.

DigitalOcean and Linode that I'm aware of, may be others

DigitalOcean charges extra for k8s nodes(compared to VPS), So does Linode last I bothered to check.

Scaleway

You can also use something like Rancher or k3s to keep it alive part-time.

RKE2 is the closest thing we've found to a turnkey, on prem, production ready Kubernetes distribution. Though we were last looking about a year ago so I concede there might be better or comparable options now.

nope. have a GKE cluster running "unattended" for months now. looks fine. ;)

GKE is the industry's first fully managed Kubernetes service...

I.e. you don't run k8s, Google does it for you. I'm talking about where YOU run k8s, not run ON k8s. I agree running ON k8s is pretty easy.

Almost everything is pretty simple "once you nail the concepts". It's getting to the point where you have the concepts nailed that is the measuring stick for complexity.