https://ably.com/blog/no-we-dont-use-kubernetes
For local development (a must imo), just rock a docker-compose.yml that emulates your Cloud orchestrated with terraform/cloudformation.
I am sort of k8s hater myself, because I've seen very simple and straight-forward production pipelines, reasonably well understood by admins, turn into over-complicated shit with buggy deploy pipelines literally 10 times slower that no one really understands. All of this to manage maybe 10 nodes per service. All of that said, I cannot deny that these new solutions are something that previous generation of ansible scripts and AWS primitives were not. Now we can move all of it to pretty much any infrastructure without changing much. And as much as I hate it, I don't really have an answer to "what else, if not kubernetes?" that doesn't feel a little bit dishonest. I seriously would like to hear one.
So if you build the right interface abstractions around those components, it gets you a long way.