This is not always a problem of Kubernetes itself though, but of teams always chasing after the latest shiny thing.
Automatically created for me: - Ingress, TLS, Domain name, Deployment strategy, Dev/Prod environments through helm, Single repo configuration for source code, reproducible dev/prod build+run (Docker)...
If a company sets this up correctly developers can create tooling incredibly fast without any tickets from a core infra team. It's all stable and very performant.
I'd never go back to the old way of deploying applications after seeing it work well.
I find that it has its place in companies with lots of micro services. But I think that because it is made "easy" it encourages unnecessary fragmentation and one ends up with a distributed monolith.
In my opinion, unless you actually have separate products or a large engineering team, a monolith is the way to go. And in that case you get far with a standard CI/CD pipeline and "old school" deployments
But of course I will never voice my opinion in my current company to avoid the "boomer" comments behind my back. I want to stay employable and am happy to waste company resources to pad my resume. If the CTO doesn't care about reducing complexity and costs, why should I?
Also a release is just a PR merge + helm upgrade.
If one has a small project where a few seconds of downtime is acceptable, you can just setup a simple Github action triggered on commit/merge. It can scp the file to the server and run "sysctl restart" automatically. I have used this approach for small side projects (even with external paying users)
And if you need a "no downtime" release, a proper CI/CD pipeline can handle a blue/green switch. I don't think you would spend much more time setting that up, than Kubernetes from scratch unless you have extensive experience with Kubernetes.
Typically, a k8s installation is looked after by a cross-functional Platform team, who look after not just the k8s cluster but also the gateways, service mesh, secrets management, observability and other common services, shared container images, CI/CD tooling, as well as platform security and governance.
These platform services then get consumed by the feature dev teams (of which there could be anywhere between half a dozen and multiple thousands). To deploy a new app, those dev teams need only create a repo and a helm chart, and the platform's self-service tooling will do the rest automatically. It really shouldn't take more than a few minutes for a team with some experience.
Yes, it's optimised for a very different scale of operation than a single server at a managed hosting provider. But there are plenty of situations in which that scale is required, and it's there that k8s shines.
How long would you estimate that deployment would have taken with more a „classic“ approach? (e.g. deploying to a Java application server)
With a well managed Kubernetes, around 5-15 minutes. Not a theoretical time, I have personally had thousands of devs launch that quickly on clusters I ran.