k8s is simply a set of bullet proof ideas to run production grade services forcing "hope is not a strategy" as much as possible, it standardises things like rollouts, rolling restarts, canary deployments, failover etc. You can replicate it with a zoo of loosely coupled products but a monolith which you can hire for with impeccable production record and industry certs will always be preferable to orgs. It's Googles way of fighting cloud vendor lockin' when they saw they're losing market share to AWS. Only large companies need it really, a small 5 person startup will do on Digital Ocean VPS just fine with some S3 for blob storage and CDN cache.