If you do find yourself wanting to create a cluster by hand, it's probably because you don't actually need lots of machines in the "cluster". In my experience it's super handy to run tests on a single-node "cluster", and then k3s is super simple. It takes something like 8 seconds to install k3s on a bare CI/CD instance, and then you can install your YAML and see that it works.

Once you're used to it, the high-level abstractions of k8 are wonderful. I run k3s on raspberry pi's because it takes care of all sorts of stuff for you, and it's easy to port code and design patterns from the big backend service to a little home project.