Kubernetes is still the default answer for way too many teams that just need a box that restarts. If you are running a handful of services, the control plane, the service mesh, the RBAC, and the YAML sprawl are a tax you pay every single day. That complexity is not a feature, it is operational debt that eats your engineers' time. I get it, it scales, but most of you are not Google, and your real problem is not orchestration, it is just deployment. Run a simpler platform until you actually hit the wall, then adopt K8s with a team that can afford it.