> Admittedly, I've been using Kubernetes since the early days and I manage an Infra team

I think this is where the big difference is. If you're leading a team and introduced all good practices from the start, then the k8s and Terraform or whatever config files can never get so very complicated that a Gordian knot isn't created.

Perhaps k8s is nice and easy to use - many of the commands certainly are, in my experience.

Developers have, over years and decades, learned how to navigate code and hop from definition to definition, climbing the tree and learning the language they're operating in, and most of the languages follow similar-enough patterns that they can crawl around.

Configuring a k8s cluster has absolutely none of that knowledge built up; and, reading something that has rough practices is not a good place to learn what it should look like.

Thank you. I can always xargs grep for a function name, at worst. Dir() in python at a debugger for other things. With YAML, kubernetes and other devops hotness, I frequently can’t even find the relevant scripts/YAML that are executed nor their codebases.

This also happens with configuration based packaging setups. Python hatch in particular, but sometimes node/webpack/rollup/vite.