K3s is light in terms of resources, but heavy in operational complexity, I’m not looking for a smaller version of kubernetes but for a simple way to run container backed services when you’re not google but a small company, something that has few moving parts but is very reliable and low maintenance.

I've been back and forth on this for a long time, but I've just decided at this point that I either settle for podman or docker on a single host, or go to Talos / k3s / k8s. There's a lot of tools there, a lot of inertia, and eventually it's likely that I will need to solve the problems that k8s does.

YMMV

It that's what you want to do, just get something running... what's wrong with docker swarm?