I'm not an insider but afaik anything heavy lifting in Google is C++ or Go. There's no way you can use Python for anything heavy at Google scale, it's just too slow and bloated.

Most stuff I've seen run on k8s is not crappy webapp in Python. If anything that is less likely to be hosted in k8s.

I'm not sure why you call k8s api shitty. What is the NixOS API for "deploy an auto-scaling application with load balancing and storage"? Does NixOS manager clusters?

How much experience do you have with k8s?