In my experience AWS is the huge waste of time. I spent years on and off effectively building poor implementations of k8s to make AWS digestible to developers. If you work in "IT" rather than infrastructure for a large software company you might not have experienced this as internal IT is more static and easy to run on AWS/VMWare/whatever.

For me k8s finally signals moving beyond that problem and onto more interesting things as it "solves" that. Devs understand it "well enough" or can copy/paste from another project and get going without hand holding.

People that don't understand the value of the single unified API vs the hodge podge of AWS garbage (don't even mention CloudFormation) are completely missing the point. Sure it's no better for running your "IT" workloads, but that isn't what it's for.

I've hardly looked at k8s, it looked like a pain to get a docker-compose file running in it the last time I looked. I think there was a tool to translate it to something kubernetes could deal with.

That said, after the last four months I've had of trying to get Route53, API Gateway, Lambdas, ECS, VPCs, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, etc, etc running in CloudFormation I really can't imagine it's worse under any slightly involved scenario.