I ran small bootstrapped startup , I used GKE. Everything was templated.

each app has it's own template e.g. nodejs-worker, and you don't change the template unless you really needed.

i spent ~2% of my manger+eng leader+hiring manger+ god knows what else people do at startup on managing 100+ microservices because they were templates.

We may have a different understanding of "small" if you say 100+ services.

Did each employee have 2 to 3 services to maintain? If so, that sounds like an architectural mistake to me.

That works great until you want to change something low-level and have to apply it to all those templates.