I don't get the hate even if you are a small company. K8s has massively simplified our deployments. It used to be each app had it's own completely different deployment process. Could have been a shell script that SSHed to some VM. Who managed said VM? Did it do its own TLS termination? Fuck knows. Maybe they used Ansible. Great, but that's another tool to learn and do I really need to set up bare metal hosts from scratch for every service. No, so there's probably some other Ansible config somewhere that sets them up. And the secrets are stored where? Etc etc.

People who say "you don't need k8s" never say what you do need. K8s gives us a uniform interface that works for everything. We just have a few YAML files for each app and it just works. We can just chuck new things on there and don't even have to think about networking. Just add a Service and it's magically available with a name to everything in the cluster. I know how to do this stuff from scratch and I do not want to be doing it every single time.