The biggest benefits seem to be
(1) simplicity, but GCE and minikube are easy enough to learn in a day and
(2) ability to run non-containers, but docker containers are generic - they can run java apps just fine.
Nomad is operationally simple, you can run it out of your normal devops roles, you don't need dedicated staff. Mostly because you can pretty easily wrap your head around what it does and how it works.
This saves you bundles of cash and time.
I hope whatever you are running under k8s isn't crucial or important, and I really hope I'm not a customer of whatever you "operate".
Maintenance is real, that applies to everything if you want it to work reliably for any length of time. There are various ways to handle maintenance, do a little consistently and constantly (what most of us professionals do) or do large bulk-replacements every X time (like when stuff crashes and burns - and nobody can remember how to fix it, so they just replace it with whatever is new and shiny).
I am a 1 man shop. I manage my cluster in ~10 minutes per month.
AWS is the new one, just started a few weeks ago.
Upgrading it is hard. Especially with stuff like Kafka/ZooKeeper run on a K8S cluster.