It’s a nice portable target, with very well defined interfaces. It’s easy to start with and pretty easy to manage if you don’t try to abuse it.
I mean the real answer it is got easily to deploy k8s so the justification for not using it kinda vanished.
I feel the same. I feel like it's a me problem. I was able to build and run massive systems at scale and never used kubernetes. Then, all of a sudden, around 2020, any time I wanted to build or run or do anything at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes. And then when I wanted to do anything with docker in production, not even at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes.
Then there was a brief period around 2021 where everyone - even kubernetes fans - realised it was being used everywhere, even when it didn't need to be. "You don't need k8s" became a meme.
And now, here we are, again, lots of people saying "just use k8s for everything".
I've learned it enough to know how to use it and what I can do with it. I still prefer to use literally anything else apart from k8s when building, and the only time I've ever felt k8s has been really needed to solve a problem is when the business has said "we're using k8s, deal with it".
It's like the Javascript or WordPress of the infrastructure engineering world - it became the lazy answer, IMO. Or the me problem angle: I'm just an aged engineer moaning at having to learn new solutions to old problems.