it's baffling to me that realising that your application deployment requirements don't fit k8s means that k8s is not fit for purpose. Note that the alternative isn't a return to the management of VMs, which we all agree none of us ever want to return to, but is a cloud service which hides the concerns that k8s makes explicit.

It's a bit short-sighted (granted not intentionally) to talk about k8s not being fit for purpose without specifying the workloads it's not suitable for and at what scale of operations. Often times when these discussions come up it's usually reduced to a stateless web app being the justification for illustrating the shortfalls of k8s as a solution.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of k8s because it can be complex but the alternatives tend to be more complex. I can guarantee, your solution over time will converge on operational knowledge trapped in the minds of your team members , runbooks and custom scripts that express an abstraction that k8s implements perfectly well.