I'm not saying its not possible for small companies to run a handfull of VMs for themself.

But you reach quickly enough an size where a central managed kubernetes cluster is very versatile for your whole company.

1-2 People take care of the cluster, the other teams then use that kubernetes cluster for your build, hosting of staging envs etc.

And then you have a very small infra team which is much better able to provide those services to others internally much easier and safer.