Without regard to the merit of each tech, I've made the J2EE to K8S comparison before and am glad to see here I am not the only one who saw the resemblance.

It mostly goes to show that containerizing application code for execution in a managed environment in nothing new. I'm sure this was also done somehow in the mainframe world.

As to whether K8S is a superior embodiment of the concept, I'd say that the problem is rather that a large majority of adopters are just cargo-culting without having a real need for what it actually provides, externalizing the costs of complexity it brings. I have nothing against K8S itself, but its adoption curve is telling of CV-driven architecture at it's worst. Mind you, the same might have been said of J2EE back in the day.