By the time you get to need to learn Kubernetes, people are usually too far deep in their engineering careers and already have this 'not even more shit' fatigue.

Yup.

K8s is worth having a dedicated platform engineering team around to keep running. It's a complicated system, and having feature devs waste cycles on it gets you a half assed unstable cluster, and half assed features.

Good news, most people don't need it, Ave the ones that do can afford a dedicated team

In my experience, the problem always comes from salesmen wanting to parrot shit about being "cloud native", "high availability", "scalable", "state of the art", and other bullshit.

And they end paying absurd amounts of money and man hours for something they could easily run in a couple computers gathering dust in the corner.