>It's not that complicated if you limit yourself to the core stuff.
Isn't this the core problem with a lot of technologies. There's a right way to use it, but most ways are wrong. An expert will not look left and right anymore, but to anyone entering the technology with fresh eyes it's a field with abundance of landmines to navigate around.
It's simply bad UX and documentation. It could probably be better. But now it's too late to change everything because you'd annoy all the experts.
>There's way too much vendor garbage surrounding the ecosystem
Azure has been especially bad in this regard. Poorly documented in all respects, too many confusing UI menus that have similar or same names and do different things. If you use Azure Kubernetes the wrapper makes it much harder to learn the "core essentials". It's better to run minkube and get to know k8s first. Even then a lot of the Azure stuff remains confusing.