This article kinda reads like "I didn't need HA, and you probably don't either". HA isn't necessary, but if you want a reliable system that will be online without being woken up at 3am (assuming you even have alerts at that point), you're better off with HA.

Similarly, you don't need Kubernetes, but if you want something that makes developer's life's easier, makes it easy to use a singular API, has many, many integrations and tooling, then you're better off with K8s. Sure, you can go with VMs, but now you have to scale and manage your application on a per VM level instead of per container. You have to think about a lot of cloud specific services, network policies, IAMs, I don't know what else, scaling.

I guess what I'm saying, you always have the option of writing in Assembly, but why would you when you can have a higher level language that abstracts most of it away. Yes, the maintenance burden on the devops/platform team is higher, but it's so much easier for users of the platform to use said platform.