I have been saying this to my customers for a long time, most projects do not really benefit from K8s but on the contrary, it is a huge operational/cost compromise to use K8s for a monolith app that does simple CRUD operations where occasional downtime is actually acceptable.

In my last project, I removed the unnecessary complexity that K8s was bringing and went back to ansible scripts, which has worked nicely.

With another customer, we inherited a frontend application that was being deployed with K8s while vercel is a considerably simpler/faster alternative.

K8s certainly has its advantages but I'd bet that many projects using it do not gain much.