IMO the actual experience you want is something as simple as you can do with those old-school simple PHP-based "serverless" web hosters. You just upload your stuff and maybe configure a database URL and that's it.

Regarding AWS, function.zip Lambda + DynamoDB + S3 + SQS is basically this at "enterprise-grade".

Now you have the in-between left, where you want enterprise-grade (availability, scaling and fault tolerance) but with a catch (like lower costs, more control, data sovereignty or things that are not as serverless as you want, e.g. search engine etc.). In these cases you will run into many trade-off decisions, that may lead you to K8s, cloud specific stacks and also simple VM ClickOps / ShellOps setups.

As long as you can still be on the pet instead of cattle range of problems, K8s is not what you want. But as soon as you want cattle, reproducible throw-away online environments etc. "just have a VM or a physical server" will become a "build your own private cloud solution" that may or may not become a bad private cloud / K8s.