Just because you're using VMs doesn't mean you're now dealing with state.

It's 100% possible to have stateless VMs running in an auto-scaling instance group (in GCP speak, I forget what AWS calls them)

Once you have the tools to manage all of that, you effectively have kubernetes. Container vs VM is largely irrelevant to what the op is complaining about when it comes to k8s.

People that don’t like k8s tend to be fine with docker. It’s usually that they don’t like declarative state or thinking in selectors and other abstractions.

In the beginning AWS didn't even support state on their VMs! All VMs were ephemeral with no state persistence when terminated. They later introduced EBS to allow for the more classic enterprise IT use cases.