I think the only high barrier of entry is actually getting a cluster going outside of Minikube. The abstractions for pods, services, replica-sets etc are pretty

I think the only high barrier of entry is actually getting a cluster going outside of Minikube. The abstractions for pods, services, replica-sets etc are pretty easy to understand and the alternative for scaling a service/making it discoverable/highly available has a higher barrier of entry IMO. We just don't see it that way because we have lived it. If I told someone that had no experience with dev-ops how to do this in K8s vs setting up load balancers/DNS/health checking it would be much more difficult. The barrier to entry that is currently high (setting up a cluster) is getting much easier with projects and services on many cloud platforms doing that for you.