I'd be curious what a better alternative looks like.

I'm a huge fan of keeping things simple (vertically scaling 1 server with Docker Compose and scaling horizontally only when it's necessary) but having learned and used Kubernetes recently for a project I think it's pretty good.

I haven't come across too many other tools that were so well thought out while also guiding you into how to break down the components of "deploying".

The idea of a pod, deployment, service, ingress, job, etc. are super well thought out and are flexible enough to let you deploy many types of things but the abstractions are good enough that you can also abstract away a ton of complexity once you've learned the fundamentals.

For example you can write about 15 lines of straight forward YAML configuration to deploy any type of stateless web app once you set up a decently tricked out Helm chart.. That's complete with running DB migrations in a sane way, updating public DNS records, SSL certs, CI / CD, having live-preview pull requests that get deployed to a sub-domain, zero downtime deployments and more.