Docker Swarm mode? I know it’s not as well maintained, but I think it’s exactly what you talk about here (forget K3s, etc). I believe smaller companies run it still and it’s perfect for personal projects. I myself run mostly docker compose + shell scripts though because I don’t really need zero-downtime deployments or redundancy/fault tolerance.

Somebody gave me the advice that we shouldn't start our new project on k8s, but should instead adopt it only after its value became apparent.

So we started by using docker swarm mode for our dev env, and made it all the way to production using docker swarm. Still using it happily.