Feel free, but it's a bad hill.
I can write my own config management, secret management, volume mounting, deployments, replica scaling, hardware affinity, antiaffinity for resilience, rollover kicking out e.g. staging if there's not enough room to schedule production workloads, and the list goes on.
I can also figure out how to install and upgrade each piece of software in my universe, across a few different languages.
Or I can just use kubernetes.
From the perspective of my developers, they tell me a few things like: "I need 4GB RAM, 2 cores, I need access to the postgres secret to talk to it, and here is my hostname" and while they can tell me many, many more things, with that little information, they can have a full application in one of several different languages in minutes.
If I were to hand roll this, it'd be held together by prayers and duct tape. And I lose out on a huge active community building tools around this. I now have istio and get cross service telemetry. For free. I can set networking rules up setting up QOS between arbitrary services, both inside my network and outside. All applied behind a single interface. There's a lot of stuff I get for free, and as my team discovers things it needs to do, I have a consistent layer to do that all behind.
I'm one guy. I don't work for Google. But my team still manages _a lot_ of services, both on application end, and things like queues, databases, etc. You can say we don't need all of that, but you'd be wrong. We arguably could use more. I can reason about my infrastructure in both the small and the large.
Then you get into the idea of transferring to other companies. If someone comes into my org, they can look at what I have and see more or less everything there is in any part of my infrastructure. It's all right there, laid out in YAML. If I were to switch companies, or even teams, it'd be the same. Having a lingua franca of common terms and ideas is super critical there. To say nothing of all the work happening in the ecosystem allowing me to help my users ship features faster to our stakeholders. Doing this in VMs would be a literal nightmare.
So, respectfully, I believe your opinion is not correct here. You personally may not need it, but it's not very long before you get to reasonable amounts of services for any project that's sufficiently complex, in my experience. And even when I have just 1 or 2 I still need many of the primitives of kubernetes.