I tried using k8s for a personal projects cluster a while back and found it very frustrating to use in a whole bunch of ways, whether managed or not. I ended up just using straight docker swarm and it works fine for that level of need, especially combined with something like portainer. Much simpler and easy to understand what's going on. Obviously it's not a very useful solution on its own beyond a certain scaling point but it probably meets most small use case needs.

But it doesn't get brought up as an option very often because docker basically FUDed themselves by having two things called swarm and then loudly killing the older one making everyone think it no longer exists.