In the happy path, your developers no longer need to worry about this stuff. It’s possible for a team to stand up a new service and plumb it through all the way

In the happy path, your developers no longer need to worry about this stuff. It’s possible for a team to stand up a new service and plumb it through all the way to the external LB just using k8s yaml templates. In the unhappy path, sure, you need someone who knows how to debug networking issues, and in some cases it’s going to be harder to debug because of the layers of indirection. But the total amount of toil is significantly reduced. A bad abstraction doesn’t carry its weight in complexity. A good abstraction allows you to ignore the lower levels most of the time without missing something important; I’d put k8s firmly in the latter category.