I used to feel the same way, but have come around. I think it's great for small companies for a few reasons. I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned.

I basically don't have to think about ops anymore until something exotic comes up, it's nice. I agree that it feels clunky, and it was annoying to learn, but once you have something working it's a huge time saver. The ability to scale without drastically changing the system is a bonus.

> I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned.

I can do the same thing with `make local` invoking a few bash commands. If the complexity increases beyond that, a mistake has been made.

You could say the same thing about Ansible or Vagrant or Nomad or Salt or anything else.

I can say with complete confidence however, that if you are running Kubernetes and not thinking about ops, you are simply not operating it yourself. You are paying someone else to think about it for you. Which is fine, but says nothing about the technology.