K8s is painful to manage. It's a lot less painful than getting paged in the middle of the night because your server is down - And much much less than realizing that you've been down for an entire day and didn't notice. (K8s isn't even a complete solution to these problems! Just one part of a complete ~balanced breakfast~ production stack)

You don't need k8s for all of that, but there's not a simpler solution than k8s that handles as much.

Life is full of pain. Deal with it.