> Just feels like lots of devs will take whatever random configs they find online

Well it usually isn't a mystery. Requiring a developer team to learn k8s likely with no resources, time, or help is not a recipe for success. You might have minimised someone else's ops work, but at what cost?

I am partly sympathetic to that (and am a person who does this) but I think too many devs are very nihilistic and use this as an excuse to stop thinking. Everyone in a company is busy doing stuff!

There's a lot of nuance here. I think ops teams are comfortable with what I consider "config spaghetti". Some companies are incentivised to ship stuff that's hard to configure manually. And a lot of other dynamics are involved.

But at the end of the day if a dev copy-pastes some config into a file, taking a quick look over and asking yourself "how much of this can I actually remove?" is a valuable skill.

Really you want the ops team to be absorbing this as well, but this is where constant atomization of teams makes things worse! Extra coordination costs + a loss of a holistic view of the system means that the iteration cycles become too high.

But there are plenty of things where (especially if you are the one integrating something!) you should be able to look over a thing and see, like, an if statement that will always be false for your case and just remove it. So many modern ops tools are garbage and don't accept the idea of running something on your machine, but an if statement is an if statement is an if statement.