but the situation could be the reverse: I replace someone who did a pile of k8s and didn't document anything, and while I could orchestrate the whole with libvirt recipes in my sleep, I wouldn't even know how to look up the command
True. In order to know kubernetes, you need to know kubernetes. But the point is at least it's a framework rather than someone you or I came up with and never wrote down. But if you don't know it, you don't know it. The question is, is learning it useful?
> kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
so familiarity is not a good argument here