We have similar backgrounds, and I totally agree with your k8s sentiment.

But I wonder what this solves?

Because I stopped abusing k8s and started using more container hosts with quadlets instead, using Ansible or Terraform depending on what the situation calls for.

It works just fine imho. The CI/CD pipeline triggers a podman auto-update command, and just like that all containers are running the latest version.

So what does uncloud add to this setup?