K8s is very easy to keep maintained, especially because even for self hosted there are plenty of management tools around.
And it allows your teams to deploy everything they need without a admin team.
Even ingress you can define
And it allows your teams to deploy everything they need without a admin team.
Even ingress you can define
They are very easy to use
Also most tools that were build to manage k8s cluster were nice to deploy a new cluster, not so much to upgrade a cluster so you would have to create new clusters every time you wanted an upgrade. It can scale when clusters and blast radius is small but can be complicated when it involves contributions from n teams. For this reason when we were managing our own k8s cluster on prem, we were using kubespray which worked but upgrades were a multiple hours affair.
And so so much changed in the last 4 years.
But at least for me, the 'easy to use' threshold happend somewhere like 2-3 years ago.
And Gardner for example upgrades quite well.
Rke2 is quite stable for me but rancher integration is still not perfect.
But even doing k8s by hand with Ansible was already double 3 years ago. That's what I started and I had it up and running. I switched to rke2 because I realized that this will not be sustainable/ is not worth it to do it myself on this level.
I actually thought it would be good to write a k8s blog article After Reading this blog.
If you can, click yourself a small cluster in one of the big cloud providers.
Alternativly I think Google has some k8s colabs were you can try it out.
Setting up a small application yourself or looking into what helm charts exist might help .
Like the helm charts for known open source projects like PostgreSQL from bitnami.