> It's used as a buffer between the dev team and the ops team, who usually have different schedules/budgets

That depends on your definition. If the ops team is solely responsibly for running the Kubernetes cluster, then yes. In reality that's rarely how things turns out. Developers want Kubernetes, because.... I don't know. Ops doesn't even want Kubernetes in many cases. Kubernetes is amazing, for those few organisations that really need it.

My rule of thumb is: If your worker nodes aren't entire physical hosts, then you might not need Kubernetes. I've seen some absolutely crazy setups where developers had designed this entire solution around Kubernetes, only to run one or two containers. The reasoning is pretty much always the same, they know absolutely nothing about operations, and fail to understand that load balancers exists outside of Kubernetes, or that their solution could be an nginx configuration, 100 lines of Python and some systemd configuration.

I accept that I lost the fight that Kubernetes is overly complex and a nightmare to debug. In my current position I can even see some advantages to Kubernetes, so I was at least a little of in my criticism. Still I don't think Kubernetes should be your default deployment platform, unless you have very specific needs.