For a lot of people in practice, Kubernetes was what replaced use of Ansible (or Chef etc.), so the OP take makes sense. Also, the transition you describe isn’

For a lot of people in practice, Kubernetes was what replaced use of Ansible (or Chef etc.), so the OP take makes sense. Also, the transition you describe isn’t the whole story. Containers meant that the node configuration essentially stopped mattering - the node contains no application-specific code or dependencies. This shift wasn’t due to Kubernetes alone, but Kubernetes became the standard way to manage such systems.