What I can say definitively is that having gone from not doing any infra work to using k8s and then over the past few months trying my hand at a bare-metal setup, just spinning up a Linux box and hand installing deps via apt or snap was far more enjoyable/easy to follow.

Primarily because there was very little obscurity (i.e., config files that automate away a lot of thinking or Dockerfiles/containers doing the same). It also left me feeling more confident about stability because if something isn't working, it's pretty clear what I broke/forgot. Worst "bug" I ran into was a snap server hanging when installing a dependency.