The first real CCIE certificate awarded was in 1993, #1025. 18k was something in like the year 2005 when I was in my early 20s.

Kubernetes was barely a blip on the map until 2017. There was Cisco routing and switching hardware LONG before there was even a CCIE certification.

This is a new ecosystem. Of course it takes time to develop experts.

A CCIE not touching a network for 10 years? That's ludicrous. I was a network engineer. I wish that was even remotely the case. I was constantly fighting firmware/bugs/etc. In fact I swore off Cisco and began working on my JNCIE at some point to stick with Juniper which of course had it's own issues.

I've run k8s 1.5 in production for 2 years on various clusters. That is almost a 2 year old release. I've had zero k8s specific problems. I recently migrated those clusters to 1.9 and apart from updating some API endpoints that changed over the major releases, and a lot of annotations that changed, it was very little actual work. It was mostly tedious "find & replace" work.

I'm not going to bullshit people. K8s has its bugs, quirks and is complex, but there seem to be a huge number of people who run away in fear on HN.

It can be understood. I didn't even know how to use Docker before I jumped into learning k8s.