Maybe so, but anyone should definitely use more criteria than my few word generalization to choose their deployment infrastructure. :)

We (mostly) chose k8s over other solutions because of other tools/providers in the ecosystem that made business sense for us. But we did need something to abstract our deployment complexity.

I’m mostly suggesting that I suspect many of the people with bad k8s experience didn’t really need it.

I’ve seen a number of people wrap a simple application in a container, slap it in a deployment/service/ingress and call it a day, it works, but using k8s that way doesn’t really add much value.

Maybe, but for better or worse it's also become the industry standard, much like Terraform.

If you don't know k8s and Terraform, you're shooting yourself in the foot for future jobs.