Agreed. The best thing we did back when we ran k8s clusters, was moving a few stateful services to dedicated VMs and keep the clusters for stateless services (the bulk) only. Running k8s for stateless services was an absolute bliss.

At that time stateful services were somewhat harder to operate on k8s because statefulness (and all that it encapsulates) was kinda full of bugs. That may certainly have changed over the last few years. Maybe we just did it wrong. In any case if you focused on the core parts of k8s that were mature back then, k8s was (and is) a good thing.