if you're on microservices, it's no brainer. You'll need an army of DevOps with semi-custom scripts to maintain the same. It's really automating a lot of stuff. Helm + Kubernetes let our company's ability to launch microservices with no DevOps involved. You just provide the name of the project, push to git and GitLab CI will pick it up and do the stuff by the template. Even junior developers in our team are doing that from day one. Isn't that a future we dream about? If you have too much load it will autoscale pod, if node is overloaded it will autoscale node pool, if you have a memory leak it will restart the app so you can sleep at night. I can provide a million examples that make our 100+ microservices management so much simpler. No Linux kungfu, 0 bash scrips, no SSH, and interaction with OS, not a single devops role for 15+ developers team.

Our management of cluster is just a simple "add more CPU or memory to this nodepool", sometimes change a nodepool name for deployment for certain service. All done simple cloud management UI. For those who call microservices fancy stuff. No, we are a startup with fast delivery, deploy cycle. We have tons of subproject , integrations, and our main languages are nodejs, golang and python. Some of these are not good at multi-thread so no way to run it as a monolith. The other one is used only when it's needed for high performance. So All together Microservices + Kubernetes + Helm + good CI + proper pubsub gives our backend extremely simple fast cycle of development, delivery, and what's important flexibility in terms of language/framework/version.

What is also good is the installation of services. With helm I can install high availability redis setup for free in 5 minutes. The same level of setup will cost you several thousand dollars for devops work and further maintenance and update. With k8s it's simple helm install stable/redis-ha

So yeah, I can totally understand some simple projects don't need k8s. I can understand you can build something is Scala and Java slowly but with high quality as a monolith. You don't need k8s for 3 services. I can understand some old DevOps don't want to learn new things and they complain about a tool that reduces the need of these guys. Otherwise, you really need k8s.