My main complaint about Kubernetes is that it feels like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm - unless you're FAANG-scale, the extra overhead and complexity it imposes to use it at all massively outweigh its benefits. And it's usually not that it's different things that you have to understand, but rather that it's more things, to accomplish the same final goal. E.g., to set up networking without Kubernetes, you need to understand traditional networking architecture, but to set up networking with Kubernetes, you need to understand traditional networking Architecture and the Kubernetes way of doing networking.