Your statement already support that without the blessings of engineering team of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Digital Ocean and various managed kubernetes service

Your statement already support that without the blessings of engineering team of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Digital Ocean and various managed kubernetes service it's impossible for a reasonable small team to manage and monitor k8s and all of this service comes with lock-in and additional capital outlay. Obviously for a Google Cloud Partner, more people are tied to gcp and kubernetes, higher the revenue. Its secondary if it's really necessary for an application to require k8s.