> just use a PaaS like Google App Engine, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Digital Ocean App Platform, or Heroku.

This is the right way for web most of the time, but most places will choose k8s anyway. It’s perplexing until you come to terms with the dirty secret of resume driven development, which is that it’s not just junior engs but lots of seniors too and some management that’s all conspiring to basically defraud business owners. I think the unspoken agreement is that Hard work sucks, but easy work that helps you learn no transferable skills might be worse. The way you evaluate this tradeoff predictably depends how close you are to retirement age. Still, since engineers are often disrespected/discarded by business owners and have no job security, oaths of office, professional guilds, or fiduciary responsibility.. it’s no wonder things are pretty mercenary out there.

Pipelines are as important as web these days but of course there are many options for pipelines as a service also.

K8s is the obviously correct choice for teams that really must build new kinds of platforms that have many diverse kinds of components, or have lots of components with unique requirements for coupling (like say “scale this thing based on that other thing”, but where you’d have real perf penalties for leaving the k8s ecosystem to parse events or whatever).

The often mentioned concern about platform lock in is going to happen to you no matter what, and switching clouds completely rarely happens anyway. If you do switch, it will be hard and time consuming no matter what.

To be fair, k8s also enables brand new architectural possibilities that may or may not be beautiful. But it’s engineering, not art, and beautiful is not the same as cheap, easy, maintainable, etc.