With the best possible intentions, the above is very much not a good overview of the current K8s ecosystem.

K8s is hugely supported and invested in by Alibaba, and TONS of companies you've never heard of.

All of these companies have huge, mission critical reasons not to use AWS/Azure/GCP and invest in K8s.

From an end user's standpoint, I am certainly not going to dispute your criticisms about Helm.

Google's original design of K8s seems like it was originally designed to be generically worse than GCP.

However, from an ecosystem standpoint, K8s is a project I'm very confident will be around for a long time.