i would have agreed with OP three years ago when kubernetes was very niche and setting it up was difficult. today, kubes is very easy to get going with. you ca

i would have agreed with OP three years ago when kubernetes was very niche and setting it up was difficult. today, kubes is very easy to get going with. you can set it up locally with kind or k3s for local dev, and use a cloud vendor's flavor in production. last time i tried to get a local dev env working for lambda, i spent a lot of time hacking on runtime-level stuff. it was not pleasant. additionally, the market of devs and operators fluent in it has grown by a lot. many people are getting their CKx certs, and there are enough companies using it now to create reliable supply. i say this because the lift from "my app is working in docker" to "my app is working in kubernetes" is much smaller than it used to be. given that OP is suggesting container runtimes as the alternative (which can get very expensive; much more so than using kubernetes for everything), i think that if a business is at a point where they are containerizing to accelerate releases, then kubernetes is a natural next step. anything else in between is at best a costly dependency and at worst throwaway.