You don't choose EKS because it's easy to manage. You choose it because you intend to use the bevy of other AWS hosted services. The clusterfuck of management is directly related to that.

The alternative, which I feel is far too common (and I say this as someone who directly benefits from it): You choose AWS because it's a "Safe" choice and your incubator gets you a bunch of free credits for a year or two. You pay nothing for compute for the first year, but instead pay a devops guy a bunch to do all the setup - In the end it's about a wash because you have to pay a devops guy to handle your CI and deploy anyway, you're just paying a little more in the latter.

What's your issue with EKS? I operate several very simple and small single-tenant clusters, and I have to touch the infrastructure only once a year for updates