But for personal projects, which is the context of TFA, you're not going to hire a k8s guru. As others have already said, as long as your k8s setup is working as expected, everything is fine (the happy path). But if there ever is a problem with it, then you're confronted with insane complexity, and said tools/setups on top of k8s won't fix it for you; they're even working against you as you won't have learnt the k8s foo for diagnosing wtf is the problem. And in my experience, problems occur rather sooner than later. For example, just the other week a customer of mine had their IPs exhausted on their Azure cloud. Azure and k8s will just silently fail with timeouts and all kinds of weird errors but won't tell you the root cause, and it took two experts, a fresh setup of the k8s cluster from scratch, and almost a week of downtime to fix it. It doesn't help that you only have limited diagnostics on other people's clouds either.