What's wrong with recommending a managed cluster? I wouldn't use one but it is certainly an option for teams that don't want to spin up a cluster from scratch, although it comes with its own set of tradeoffs.
My project at the moment is definitely easier thanks to Kubernetes as pods are spun up dynamically and I've migrated to a different cloud provider and since migrated to a mix of dedicated servers and autoscaled VMs, all of which was easy due to the common deployment target rather than building on top of a cloud provider specific service.
Generally the only issue was forgetting to update whatever you use to setup the resources, because apiserver auto-updated the formats to the point worst case you could just grab them with kubectl get ... -o yaml/json and trim the read-only fields.