Continuous deployment systems like ArgoCD and Flux, user friendly local development environments with tools like Tilt, novel networking, distributed storage, di

Continuous deployment systems like ArgoCD and Flux, user friendly local development environments with tools like Tilt, novel networking, distributed storage, distributed tracing, etc. systems that are basically plug-and-play, etc. Search for "awesome k8s" and you'll get many lists of these. It's surely possible to cobble all of this together without k8s, but k8s' main advantage is exposing a standardized API that simplifies managing this entire ecosystem. It often makes it worth the additional overhead of adopting, understanding and managing k8s itself.