I think a good compromise is building your applications in a containerised manner so that you can simply run them with docker-compose, but then if it turns out you need some heavy scale, it's merely a case of switching the underlying infrastructure.

That said, my experience has been fairly different. Running microk8s on a VPS with some containers and an ingress just seems like a nice way to spin them up as pods and manage them. It really doesn't feel that complicated.

Once you integrate with cloud providers and you get more complex systems, sure, it gets more complex.

I much prefer the container paradigm for separating parts of apps out and managing dependencies and reproducibility. Having a bunch of raw servers with all the bullshit and drift and mutability that comes along with it feels far more like a headache to me than the abstraction of k8s or docker.

If you aren't deploying stuff with GitOps/IaC in 2024 I fear for anyone that has to manage or maintain it. 100% reproducibility and declarative infrastructure are wonderful things I could never come back from.