I mean, sure, kubernetes _is_ complex. But it's complex in the way that using Rails is more complex than pure Ruby. It's fine when you're playing, or you have a weird subset of problems where you don't care if someone runs or not, but as soon as you deal with the problems of HA, DR, live deployments, secret management, sharing servers, working in a team, etc then if you're solving these issues with ansible and terraform, you're probably just inventing something as complex, and worse, bespoke to your problem.
At the end of the day, once you've learned to use kube, it's probably no worse than any other configuration as code based system, and the question is which of us should be learning it and when, and which of us should just be using higher levels of abstractions like gitlabs autodevops.
Now, indeed, if you're just hacking and you have no need for a CI and CD pipeline, or reproducibility, etc, then sure, it's probably not the time to learn a hosting framework, but once you do know it, you're free to make an informed opinion on your problem.
Personally, I sell kube a lot, but I tend to work for orgs that have several development teams and several apps, and bringing them to a platform seems like a good idea. The question is, should I also put a startup on GKE, or should I do something bespoke where they can't hire another contractor to take over as easily? Personally, I'd go GKE.