I think several companies are trying to sell exactly that. if you look up VMWare's "TAP" offering it's attempting to provide a wide umbrella of components that move in that direction. Others in the space include Redhat, Replicated, Rancher.
A few individual components that try to bring back the ease of rapid/easy deploys include: Flux, Tilt, Argo, kapp-controller.
They all have slightly different priorities and make different compromises, but anyways just to assure you there's quite a few people trying to build and sell the layer you're describing.
I'd want to deploy a k8s infrastructure, but have an easy experience on top for developers that might not maximize k8s use initially, but allow devs to move down a layer eventually. The whole time the ops folks would be running k8s and limited layer above that'd keep devs in a particular lane.
Isn't this feasible?