I've just started to look into it, but it seems like the project has been focusing on improving the onboarding experience since it has a reputation for being a huge pain to set up. Do you think it has gotten easier lately?
No. Not easier in my opinion. And some of the fires you only learn after getting burnt badly. [1]
Note: my experience was all with cloud-provided Kubernetes, never running my own. So it was already an order of magnitude easier. Can't even imagine rolling my own. [2]
[1] My personal favorite. Truly egregious, despite how amazing k8s is. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/63371#issuec...
[2] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way