The amount of benefits you receive is less than if you worked for the same benefits sans kubernetes. So it definitely saves a ton of work, but your latter point

The amount of benefits you receive is less than if you worked for the same benefits sans kubernetes. So it definitely saves a ton of work, but your latter point still stands that most of the time the benefits aren't always as... beneficial to some stages of development/scale so it's actually just adding work for the sake of it.