K8s is a very complex system. And the more complex the requirements, the more complex one needs to make K8s through additional software that isn't baked in. Complex systems are costly to run, but more importantly, they're costly to maintain due to the typical level of service required, the number of employees needed to maintain it, and the amount of specialized knowledge required. The system is also under constant maintenance due to its short release cycle. Basically, you need to build an entire cloud services team just to keep it running smoothly. (not for "test labs", but for real production services) And on top of all this, if you're running it on your own hardware, you don't even get the benefit of reduced infrastructure costs.

Because this is not only hard to get right, but very costly, it is much cheaper and easier to pay someone to do all this for you. It is almost guaranteed that doing it yourself will not give you any significant advantage, cost savings, or increased development velocity.

On top of this, most people don't even need k8s. K8s is a containerized microservice mesh network. If you don't need containers and you aren't running microservices, you may be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Even if you did need k8s, the benefit may be small if you don't have complex requirements.

Most people can get high-quality, reliable end results with simple, general-purpose solutions using DevOps principles and tools. If you're not Google or Facebook, you probably just need immutable infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, logging, continuous integration/deployment, and maybe autoscaling. You don't need an orchestration framework to deliver all that. And by going with less complex implementations, it will be easier and more cost-effective to maintain.

At the end of the day, if you need k8s, use it. But I really worry about most people who hop on the k8s bandwagon because they see a lot of HN posts about it, or because Google touts it.