(I agree with your overall points, but when the GP said "Doing deployments was fine but complicated enough that only seasoned team members could do it safely" t

(I agree with your overall points, but when the GP said "Doing deployments was fine but complicated enough that only seasoned team members could do it safely" they were referring to their post-App Engine, pre-Kubernetes "manually managed VMs". I have no problem believing that deploys are very complicated in that scenario)