When folk want managed k8s, they effectively wanted something akin to a "serverless" compute pool that they point the k8s API at and worry about nothing else -

When folk want managed k8s, they effectively wanted something akin to a "serverless" compute pool that they point the k8s API at and worry about nothing else - not underlying hosts, networking configuration, storage, etc. The ideal is how close it gets to that. K3s still leaves hardware management to you.