That's really the kicker for me. When the company is set up well on k8s, then choose k8s. If the company is set up well on VPS, then choose VPS. If it got nei

That's really the kicker for me. When the company is set up well on k8s, then choose k8s. If the company is set up well on VPS, then choose VPS. If it got neither, I'm unsure what's the better way to go on a greenfield. k8s has nice tooling, but part of that is required because it is massively complex. But with managed k8s providers (e.g. GKE with autopilot) you can just put in proper CPU and memory limits and essentially get yourself a VPS provisioned without having to worry about anything by k8s measures. If you have different pricing or location constraints, then it might be better to go with different models and some custom orchestration.