I think a lot depends on the environment you're working in / migrating from. If you're working from an on-prem datacenter with VM's and you're not moving to the cloud for whatever reason. I think your point of not having to hand roll config managment, secrets management volumes ect.. is a good one and kubernetes makes a lot of sense in that environment. Or using kubernetes as a target for vendor apps that may need to run in unknown or exotic environments.
But if you're already in the cloud most of the k8 solutions already exist as individual tools, with little operational maintenance needed. "I need 4GB RAM, 2 cores, I need access to the postgres secret to talk to it, and here is my hostname" is all achievable with lambda's or ecs fargate task definitions and parameter store. Managed services for queues and databases lower operational burden. All of this while not having to risk a cluster upgrade bringing everything down or now having to increase operational overhead by running multiple clusters to have some operational blast doors.
All of this to say if kubernetes is working for you thats great! Congrats. But I'm on the hill with OP. Most platform/infrastructure engineers that I've heard pitch kubernetes because they are trying to solve one problem I.E secrets management or deployment ect... not all of the problems at once and bring in kubernetes complexity when there is already a fully managed, safer and cheaper solution to migrate to doesn't usually make sense.
There's no 100% right or wrong answer but I think you really have to evaluate what you're migrating from when evaluating moving to kubernetes
But if you're already in the cloud most of the k8 solutions already exist as individual tools, with little operational maintenance needed. "I need 4GB RAM, 2 cores, I need access to the postgres secret to talk to it, and here is my hostname" is all achievable with lambda's or ecs fargate task definitions and parameter store. Managed services for queues and databases lower operational burden. All of this while not having to risk a cluster upgrade bringing everything down or now having to increase operational overhead by running multiple clusters to have some operational blast doors.
All of this to say if kubernetes is working for you thats great! Congrats. But I'm on the hill with OP. Most platform/infrastructure engineers that I've heard pitch kubernetes because they are trying to solve one problem I.E secrets management or deployment ect... not all of the problems at once and bring in kubernetes complexity when there is already a fully managed, safer and cheaper solution to migrate to doesn't usually make sense.
There's no 100% right or wrong answer but I think you really have to evaluate what you're migrating from when evaluating moving to kubernetes