This just feels like a myth to me at this point. Kubernetes isn’t hard, the clouds have made is so simple now that it’s in no way more difficult than ECS and is way more flexible
It is by no means "a myth". There's still Helm oddities, "annotations", CRDs, mutating web hooks, operators, etc. to comprehend before you have any idea of what the system is doing. All it takes is a random annotation to throw all your assumptions away.
It's a complicated mess compared to something like a Nomad jobspec. That's one of the reasons we decided on Nomad while I was at Cloudflare.
I’m not saying I agree with the comment above you but Kubernetes upgrades and keeping all your addons/vpc stuff up to date can be a never ending slog of one-way upgrades that, when they go wrong, can cause big issues.
Those are all issues that should be solved by the managed provider.
It's been a while since I spun up a k8s instance on AWS, Azure, or the like, but when I did I was astounded at how many implementation decisions and toil I had to do myself. Hosted k8s should be plug-and-play unless you have a very specialized use-case.
If you're not paying someone to manage this for you, either you're a hobbyist (perhaps masquerading as a professional) or you have the scale or special use-case that makes you outside 95% of use-cases.
Last I checked, managed k8s clusters weren't much more expensive than the compute they ran on.
