As many people predicted years ago (I can't claim to know k8s that well, in fact I suck at it), eventually we'll go full circle and k8s config will just become its own specialized programming language.
Maybe we should stop moving these things so agonizingly slow and through the path of natural (and did I mention slow as molasses) evolution and just skip to the endgame that most of us know will inevitably come?
Apparently not.
I'd like to see Google being more brave here. They are on the forefront of k8s in many ways (or so it seems, maybe I am wrong?). Just make a specialized programming language with a good compiler / linter and let's all collectively be better for it.
Why do you need a 'specialized programming language' when kube for most people, is just waiting for various objects via api?
I mean, sure, ATM it can be a bit painful to generate your 'Deployment' object in json or yaml or whatever, but then it's just a post to the kubeapi and it's done.. You can do that in any language you want..
What am I missing?
You're missing the part where people do this periodically and can never truly remember all the gotchas so they make small mistakes with time that at one point make your cluster fall over with cryptic error messages. I've seen it (but as I said above I am by no means a k8s pro).
That's why there are these linters.
Having a small super-specialized language that catches errors before "compiling" your configuration to an YAML will help hugely.