There is a kernel of validity lurking in the heart of all this, which is that immutable images you have the ability to throw away and refresh regularly are genuinely better than long-running VMs with an OS you've got to maintain, with the scope for vulnerabilities unrelated to the app you actually want to run. Management has absorbed this one good thing and slapped layer after layer of pointless rubbish on it, like a sort of inverse pearl. Being able to say "we've minimised our attack surface with a scratch image" (or alpine, or something from one of the secure image vendors) is a genuinely valuable thing. It's just the all of the everything that goes along with it...

Sure.

The challenge is convincing people that "golden images" and containers share a history, and that kubernetes didn't invent containers: they just solved load balancing and storage abstraction for stateless message architectures in a nice way.

If you're doing something highly stateful, or that requires a heavy deployment (game servers are typically 10's of GB and have rich dynamic configuration in my experience) then kubernetes starts to become round-peg-square-hole. But people buy into it because the surrounding tooling is just so nice; and like GP says: those cloud sales guys are really good at their jobs, and kubernetes is so difficult to run reliably yourself that it gets you hooked on cloud.

There's a literal army of highly charismatic, charming people who are economically incentivised to push this technology and it can be made to work so- the odds, as they say, are against you.