Here's my conspiracy theory --

There's a certain type of engineer (maybe 25% of them) who does "hype-driven-development." No matter the technology, they are huge advocates for the technology. The hype may be absolutely real, complete nonsense (e.g. mongodb), or somewhere in between (ai). The vast majority of the time it's hype for a new technology that feels 90% the same from the end-user perspective (react vs vue, docker vs colima, go vs other, whatever vs whatever).

These engineers though, only care about something when it's new and trendy enough to be a differentiator. This is because they don't give any hoots about the actual usefulness of anything, they are just trying to differentiate themselves in a market by leveraging vibes rather than raw competence. I think these types of engineer drove kubernetes for companies that don't need it, but tipped the scales enough that it has critical mass.

The irony being kubernetes is way too heavy/clumsy an abstraction for most companies. The savings of packing pods onto the same node is usually a tiny fraction of the engineers' salaries who are managing it.

The other irony is now that kubernetes isn't the new sexy thing, but a standard tool that AI or a normie can do all the hard work for, the hype driven engineers are off looking for the next thing.

The linked article discusses very different reasons for preferring kube. CTOs and hiring managers like it for reasons totally different from the cargo cult/hype-driven engineers.