We wasted 5-6 figures of salary dollars lovingly building those clusters and the automation surrounding them. We had blue-green zero downtime deploys, but no customers who would notice any downtime to begin with. I think the CTO just wanted k8s on his resume.
In one afternoon (at most), I could have written a script to deploy our demo with docker compose over ssh. Sure, docker compose won't scale forever, but their runway didn't last forever either.