>> Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined networking layer on top of it.

I don't work that closely with k8s, but have toyed with a cluster in my homelab, etc. Way back before it really got going, I observed some OpenStack folks make the jump to k8s.

Knowing what I knew about OpenStack, that gave me an inkling that what you describe would happen and we'd end up in this place where a reasonable thing exists but it has all of this crud layered on top. There are places where k8s makes sense and works well, but the people surrounding any project are the most important factor in the end result.

Today we have an industry around k8s. It keeps a lot of people busy and employed. These same folks will repeat k8s the next time, so the best thing people that who feel they have superior taste is to press forward with their own ideas as the behavior won't change.