It has been a few years since I have used it, but I found k8s a pleasure to work with as a developer for the same reasons you have outlined. The UX of it makes it easy to play with the infrastructure. Working with configs, and using kubectl (with great tab completion) made it feel like I was just controlling a daemon on my system, but it was all of our cloud environments. I could create an environment for demoing a new feature very easily.
That said, I don't know much about setting up or running a cluster, and it seems a bit daunting. I was lucky to have had that setup and maintained by others.