Honestly baffled at how many people are convinced you need hundreds of engineers before k8s can work well - they must be doing something very different from what we are. We did keep databases out of k8s (until recently when we added CockroachDB running inside the cluster) and only had ~6 services to move which may have kept things simpler. We're now scaling to run thousands of vcpu at peak times and a dozen different services, and it's still not all that hard to manage.
Can somebody who has had the opposite experience comment on what actually made it so difficult to implement? I imagine that if you are managing the cluster control plane yourself that will make things much more difficult - but unless you have some very specific requirement you can use a hosted k8s to reduce that.