I actually found bare metal to be fairly pleasant, and because I built it I understood a ton about how it worked so was able to figure out issues a lot easier.

My advice would be to take careful notes about your setup steps though, even if you're following a guide. For some reason in the k8s world I have a hard time finding blog posts/guides/etc that I used months later, and Chrome seems to eat my bookmarks :-(. I suspect SEO is a ruthless beast when it comes to K8s.