Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you made a good faith attempt to use k8s? Or are you just regurgitating how hard it is to use based on what you hear on the Internet? My experience is even mediocre engineers are capable of understanding k8s concepts with minimal assistance assuming things are either sufficiently standard (i.e google-able) or well documented with any company specific practices. K8s == hard to run, k8s != hard to use.
I have made a good faith attempt at using it, yes. Is spending an entire week on it good faith? I did get everything running but also saw so many settings and features I had to take on faith as being handled without understanding it. I just chose not to bother further because this seems like a minefield of problems in the future as we on boarded other engineers. The number of times I’ve seen production deployments go…
You aren't meant to fully understand it in a week, anymore than you are expected to fully understand all of sysadmin in a week.
Just because you don't know what every single directive in nginx config does doesn't mean you can't use it effectively and learn what they mean when the time comes.
k8s isn't much different. You don't need to know what a liveliness probe is the first time you use it, you can learn about it as you go (most likely when you run into a badly behaved program that needs forced restarts when it hangs).
Ofcourse if you are running it yourself that is entirely different, you really do need to know how it works to do that but you should be using hosted k8s unless you have hardcore systems folk and actually need that.