I would say k8s is a piece of software that enable teams to stay small. While the internals are insanely complex the developer experience is not that hard to learn.

I agree, though it takes some discipline to keep it simple and small. It can be really easy to let your clusters get huge, tools get complex, operator sprawl, etc. but keeping it simple and understandable is worth it in the long term.

The biggest problem is that most of the popular tools are built for the target audience of "dedicated infra team", when in reality most k8s users don't really have that.