I agree. Started with a simple React for frontend and NestJS for backend. Now I am running microservices for distributing third-party widgets, my search engine, and the analytics.

Works well and it actually simplifies things a lot, each service has its repository, pipeline and permissions, developers don't need to understand the whole application to code.

You also don't have to start with Kubernetes to make microservices work, many tools can act as in-betweens. I am using app engine from gcloud, yes it's a lot of abstraction over kubernetes and it is overpriced, but I don't care. It works perfectly for these use cases and even if overpriced, it stays a low absolute value.

The caveat is that you really need to start off with a "stateless mindset".