We've been using K8s to scale incredibly high user and revenue generating services across banks, telcos, insurers for the last half decade. Works pretty well in our opinion ;)
This sounds like you worked for people who wanted to put kubernetes on their CV instead of using it to solve an actual problem.
So, most ‘experts’ then? I try to know as little about k8s and aws as I can but because of ‘people who embellished their resume’ (I am trying to be nice here), I had to because most that had it on their resume did ‘something’ with it but not anything usable. Now I can do it myself (but hate it very much) and ask questions during interviews 99% of so called ‘k8s experts’ (…) cannot answer. And I see this now happening more and more in security as well; people ran a vuns detection script once and put security expert on their resume.
It seems to me perhaps you didn't spend much time with OpenStack.
Have you heard about our lord and saviour React.js?
Be curious how Kubernetes actually creates technical debt.