This rings true every time I see someone talking about K8s. Companies just want something that is customizable to their workflow, they don't want a ready-made PaaS offering. Google's play was to provide an industry standard API interface that is available everywhere (which is essentially what Kubernetes is). Now that the control plane for compute is commoditized, GCP et al can sell complements - BigQuery, TensorFlow, GCS etc.

I think Anthos-like solutions are the future. Just buy the cheapest hardware from your local Datacentre or BareMetal providers like Hetzner and run GCP, AWS or some other flavor of software on top of it. This is also where Teleco Clouds are moving with OpenRAN and 5G, they are tired of being locked-in to full stack vendors like Nokia and Ericsson and want interchangeable solutions compatible through a common interface