I'll be honest - i've worked places where kubernetes was a thing, and places where it wasn't. Both within the last 5 years.

Kubernetes is a layer of complexity that just isn't warranted for most companies. Hell even Amazon still sticks with VMs. Autoscaling and firecracker solve most things.

Its nice to have cluster (pod?) management as a first-class concept, but you get that with tagging of instances just as well for most use cases.

In short - i think the author has a point.