Kubernetes is/was a way to fight off walled gardens from cloud providers. The other path would have been to learn the bespoke implementation of each cloud provider depending on what that employer ended up using.
Kubernetes was at the right place, at the right time just as AWS was trying to force feed people their own proprietary solution, as Azure was trying to wall off people into their own walled garden, as GCP was being Google just not giving a damn about any other usecase than what works great at a massive search company.
With Kubernetes, developers can learn one API to deploy their applications and hopefully it works on AWS, Azure, GCP, DO, OVH or a laptop at home.
So that way, developers can learn one thing and transfer their knowledge at an employer that hosts on AWS, and then another that hosts on Azure and so on.
This is in contrast to the experience of a Python developer who's mastered FastAPI/Flask/SQLAlchemy and feels absolutely lost in a Django project or an Angular developer who stares a Next.js project wondering what the heck is happening and how it all works. Neither a Next.js or an Angular developer would start off with an AWS Amplify solution if they could help it.