You can do this type of analysis for most software, since building on existing solutions allows us to write powerful tools with less code. Listing out the existing solutions that allow developers to write less code doesn't necessarily mean the new solution is bad.
Every time I read a post like this about Kubernetes, I scratch my head. It takes me maybe half a day to deploy a CI/CD pipeline pushing into a new Kubernetes cluster with persistent DB's, configuration management, auto-renewing SSL certs and autoscaling API/web servers per environment. I'm by no means an expert, but I've been running 10+ sites this way for various clients over the past five years, with almost zero headache and downtime.
When I compare this solution to the mishmash of previous technologies I used prior to Kubernetes, it clearly comes out on top (and I use/d Terraform religiously). Setting up automatic server provisioning, rolling updates, rollbacks, auto-scaling, continuous deployment, SSL, load balancing, configuration management, etc... requires an incredible amount of work. Kubernetes either provides most of these out of the box, or makes them trivial to implement.
The only way I understand this argument is if you're building an extremely simple application. The nice thing about simple applications is that you can build them using any technology you want, because they're simple. Despite this, I often Kubernetes anyways, because it's _so simple_ to take a Helm chart and update the image name.