In my experience, pods, deployments, and load balancers work similarly enough to not cause any discernible problems (with basic web application processes, like

In my experience, pods, deployments, and load balancers work similarly enough to not cause any discernible problems (with basic web application processes, like a Dockerized Node.js server) on AWS, GKE, and Digital Ocean. But that's only my experience, and there are more managed offerings than just those few. Even if it's not fully unified, it's unified enough for the use case of basic scaling of a process up/down. And, if you'll indulge me here, I was referring mostly to managed k8s offerings. Because that's what the vast majority of people would use, if they chose to go in on k8s at all and want to get out the door quickly.