K8s solves only one problem - the problem of organizational structure scaling. For example, when your Ops team and your Dev team have different product deadlines and different budgets. At this point you will need the insanity of k8s.
So Hetzner is OK for the overly complex as well, if you wish to do so.
5 mins seems unrealistic unless you’re spending time somewhere else to keep up to speed with version releases, upgrades, etc.
I’m not using k8s personally but the moment I moved from traditional infrastructure (chef server + VMs) to containers (Portainer) my level of effort went down by like 10x.
When those pink slips come in, we’ll just go somewhere else and do the same thing!