I think that all this boils down to a rather simple dilemma for modern cloud-native infrastructural platforms [in terms of developer experience, i.e., external

I think that all this boils down to a rather simple dilemma for modern cloud-native infrastructural platforms [in terms of developer experience, i.e., external APIs etc., not internal architecture; and this is not even limited to this class of systems - it is general concept for all software systems]: a) universal, highly configurable & complex (K8s) OR b) highly opinionated and [relatively] simple (e.g., Nomad/Waypoint, Heroku, Apollo, CapRover, Dokku, Porter, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Digital Ocean's App Platform, Fly, Render). Obviously, there exists a middle-ground category as well: relatively simple, but still opinionated and moderately (???) or highly (e.g., OpenShift) configurable platforms. Thus, the optimal choice depends on relevant team's or organization's priorities with respect to those attributes (configurability, complexity, level & scope of opinionation) as well as level of organizational standardization for IT environments, economic factors, vendor lock-in considerations and, perhaps, something else that I forgot to mention).