Now, I feel like i have such unique knowledge, application of k8s at such a large scale, and I no longer want to use professionally. Makes me feel like my career till this point, has basically gone to waste.
I have done oncall, CI/CD, Kubernetes, dev tooling, terraform and some other devops stuff.
Actual in-the-trenches experience of distributed systems at scale is fairly rare. Anything that helped you acquire that while being paid is likely not wasted!
I’m assuming by this you mean non-technical people.
It feels like if you can handle the chaos, an early-stage startup is the way to go for you. A single developer can significantly contribute to product discussions and infra platform decisions simultaneously.
Perhaps also look into positions outside of traditional tech? Med-tech, green-tech, etc are all in desperate need of infra experience, but tend to not have siloed roles like tech-tech has.
It'd be helpful to know why you don't want to do Ops work. There are many roles that fall outside of DevOps that have the same downsides (frequent oncall, unpredictable workloads, further from the product, CEO doesn't understand what you do, etc). There are also roles that fall under DevOps that don't have some of those downsides (infrastructure architect-type roles).
For example, there are people in the comments recommending security, which is great for job security, but generally bad if you want to do interesting work. Usually developers do most of the actually interesting security work while security teams check boxes for SOCII audits unless you're working for a security product, which can be pretty competitive.