It's a container and can be as thin or fat as you want with it's contents. You don't need to include linux inside if you don't want to. I've built containers with nothing more than a few native executables. It's just a packaging format, but easier to build and deploy than other formats like tarballs.

If you don't need K8S then don't use it. What's the problem? Run your app on your server and ignore everything else.

But most of these features have nothing to do with scale and are more about usability, reliability and consistency. Sure you can do it yourself but that's less efficient than just letting K8S do it all in one standardized way and interface.

> "I want my application to reliably and quickly serve my customers and be easy to maintain and debug."

That's what K8S helps with. I've spent 10 years running large distributed applications handling billions of requests per day in multiple regions. I don't care about the ABI and don't see why that's relevant, but I do know that K8S has made many things easier in actually running these apps.