Despite its reputation, Kubernetes is actually quite easy to master for simple use cases. And affordable enough for more complex ones.

The fundamental abstractions are as simple as they can be, representing concepts that you'd already be familiar with in a datacenter environment. A cluster has nodes (machines), and you can run multiple pods (which is the smallest deployable unit on the cluster) on each node. A pod runs various types of workloads such as web services, daemons, jobs and recurring jobs which are made available (to the cluster) as docker/container images. You can attach various types of storage to pods, front your services with load-balancers etc.

All of the nouns in the previous paragraph are available as building blocks in Kubernetes. You build your complex system declaratively from these simpler parts.

When I look at Nomad's documentation, I see complexity. It mixes these basic blocks with those from HashiCorp's product suite.

Are you referring to actually spinning up and operating your own clusters here or utilizing managed k8s (e.g. GKE/EKS)?

In my understanding, sure - using the managed services and deploying simple use cases on it might not be that big of a deal, but running and maintaining your own k8s cluster is likely far more of a challenge [1] than Nomad as I understand it.

[1] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way