K3s is just a repackaged, simplified k8s distro. You get the same behavior and the same tools as you have any time you operate an on-premises k8s cluster, and these, in my experience, are somewhere between good and excellent. So I can't imagine what you have in mind here.

"It's still essentially adding few hundred thousand lines of code into your infrastructure"

Sure. And they're all there for a reason: it's what one needs to orchestrate containers via an API, as revealed by a vast horde of users and years of refinement.