I have used nomad at my work for a few years now. I'd say where it shines is running stateless containers simply and easily. If you're trying to run redis, postgres, etc...do it somewhere else. If you're trying to spin up and down massive amounts of queue workers hour by hour, use it as a distributed cron, or hell just run containers for your public api/frontend and keep them running, nomad is great.

That said, you're going to be doing some plumbing for things like wiring your services together (Fabio/Consul Connect are good choices), detecting when to add more host machines, etc.

As far as how it compares to k8s, I don't know, I haven't used it materially yet.

Nomad can run a lot more things but it’s not so batteries included.

Nomad is trying to be an orchestrator.

Kubernetes is trying to be an operating system for cloud environments.

since they aim for being different things they make different trade offs.

Cloudflare recently posted a great blog article on how/why they use nomad: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-use-hashicorp-nomad/