This is not necessarily true. I learned Kubernetes and converted a complex network of services over from Docker about a year ago. It took me about a month. I barely have to do anything for ongoing maintenance. It's taking up less of my time than Docker Swarm did, and Swarm took up less of my time than the Ansible mess I had before that. More stuff is automated (e.g. by using k8s cron jobs). The scheduler is pretty good now and handles almost all situations by itself.

As a sole developer, I couldn't run what I do WITHOUT such an orchestration platform.

And yes, I administer my own cluster on a bunch of Vultr VMs. I've had fewer problems with this over the last 3 years than it seems people have had on GCS (recent news of outage fresh in memory).