More accurately: "Given using AWS as a requirement, I recommended ECS instead of K8s". It's not really surprising that AWS's K8S setup isn't great, and their own implementation ties in more closely with other services they offer. It's lock-in. AWS provides just enough K8S to tick the box on a spec sheet, but have little incentive to go beyond that.
Eventually EKS was built to satisfy customers that insisted these issues were just FUD from aws to lock customers into the aws infrastructure. However what I have seen since is a basic progression of: customer uses k8s on prem, is fanatical about its use. They try to use it in aws and it’s about as successful as on prem. Their peers squint at it and say “but wouldn’t this be easier with ECS/fargate?” K8s folks lose their influence and a migration happens to ECS. I’ve seen this happen inside aws working with customers and in three megacorps I’ve worked on cloud strategies for. I’ve yet to encounter a counter example, and this was sort of what Andy predicted at the time. I’m not saying there aren’t counter examples, or that this isn’t a conspiracy against k8s to get your dollars locked into aws.
On standards Andy always said that at some point cloud stuff would converge into a standards process but at the moment too little is known about patterns that work for standards to be practical. Any company launching into standards this early would get bogged down and open the door to their competitors innovating around them and setting the future standard once the time is right for it. Obviously not an unbiased viewpoint, but a view that’s fairly canonical at Amazon.