This sounds a lot like CV-driven development, rather than any actual use cases. That's not to say it's a bad idea for an individual dev, but might not say great things about our industry.
We adopted Kubernetes at our startup, it solved most ci/cd and devops issues for the team. We didn't need the scaling either, we have at max maybe 2 containers of a service but we know we are ready.
There are plenty of companies ou there that have old COTS lying around and require some sort of IT infrastructure. Being able to setup and manage a working cluster of COTS hardware is a great way to add computational resources to a company without spending au additional cash or having to rubber stamp permits.
I personally have done this in a previous job, and a small POC with minikube turned into a 3-node kubeadm cluster that deployed and managed two company-wide intranet services like a breeze. Zero cash was spent, the only resource used was a few hours of my time, everyone benefitted, and managers were very happy with the result.