I've never operated a kubernetes cluster except for a toy dev cluster for reproducing support issues.

One day it broke because of something to do with certificates (not that it was easy to determine the underlying problem). There was plenty of information online about which incantations were necessary to get it working again, but instead I nuked it from orbit and rebuilt the cluster. From then on I did this every few weeks.

A real kubernetes operator would have tooling in place to automatically upgrade certs and who knows what else. I imagine a company would have to pay such an operator.