kubernetes is an API for your cluster, that is portable between providers, more or less. there are other abstractions, but they are not portable, e.g. fly.io, DO etc. so unless you want a vendor lock-in, you need it. for one of my products, I had to migrate due to business reasons 4 times into different kube flavors, from self-manged ( 2 times ) to GKE and EKS.

> there are other abstractions, but they are not portable

Not true. Unix itself is an API for your cluster too, like the original post implies.

Personally, as a "tech lead" I use NixOS. (Yes, I am that guy.)

The point is, k8s is a shitty API because it's built only for Google's "run a huge webapp built on shitty Python scripts" use case.

Most people don't need this, what they actually want is some way for dev to pass the buck to ops in some way that PM's can track on a Gantt chart.