I think that, three years later, with many large companies having adopted the ecosystem, it has provided a lot of net positives despite the company operational

I think that, three years later, with many large companies having adopted the ecosystem, it has provided a lot of net positives despite the company operational complexities/respnsibilities it created. Kubernetes is the reason why Ops teams at large companies (with the proper will and mindset) can finally start moving away from the "Ops" side of SRE and move towards improving developer experience and encouraging a mindset of developer teams owning their infrastructure. Yes, it is a commingling of highly complex systems, but it is the simplest form it has ever been, such that developers can start working toward maintaining infrastructure. The way that I've seen large companies succeed in this transition is to concentrate existing SRE resources into educating Kubernetes consumption and having SRE create an inner-company infra platform for developers to consume, until they run into walls which is when the SRE folks come in to help. However, developers being on the hook for their infra and vulnerabilities is a good thing for culture in my opinion. It's all self-hostable too so you aren't racking up cloud bills for educating yourself/making mistakes. It also helps decouple existing services/companies from being overly attached to the stacks/languages they made their features. And for the people that say that not everything deserves Google-scale, I don't think that addresses the other features brought to the table like secrets management, container management, easy use of environment variables, stateful/reliable replicated block storage (like Rook/Ceph) easily set up for backup and consumption, and tons of other features that come out of the box with standard kubeadm/kubectl.