In the last 6 months my job has been to get production ready vault instances on azure. There's a bunch of complex, unreliable and not very fun APIs here.
Much like AWS, there isn't really a StatefulSet ( PetSet ) abstraction. To you need to write a bunch of bespoke logic where you figure which IP addresses, names, IDs, and Disks you need to attach to a new VM.
Whilst iterating, the azure APIs are eventually consistent that cause all sort of niggly problems. Resources that are created don't get added to TF when there's a failure.
I create a new vault on a PR and it takes 20 minutes to deploy.
The problem took a couple of months and I created a bunch of code.
On k8s I can just deploy the helm chart in 2 minutes. The abstractions are cleaner, it's more reliable, and way more fun.
At the end of the azure project, the team agreed to do a AKS poc, where we gave the task to the junior of the team, and the entire thing was done in a week.
If you're not doing this type of work, maybe you don't need k8s. But if you're not doing ephemeral test environments, do you actually not see them as a positive, or is it an effort thing? Because it takes me no real effort.
Very much depends on the point of view. It's great from an SRE point of view but not necessarily application/developers, who are being constrained to a platform's idiosyncracies and expressions of platform egos.
The individually simpler solutions are only complex from a high level, ivory tower, or middle management perspective, not from the perspective of people who have to use and manage the application itself.