Agreed. You really get what you pay for with the managed k8s offerings, and you really can't get a lot of good software for ~$72 per month. Not having to run the control plane is a drop in the ocean of complexity that comes with k8s (node provisioning/patching, monitoring, hardening, upgrades, intrusion detection, cluster scaling, multi-cluster, ingress, tls).

That's why things like OpenShift exist which cost an order or magnitude more than just a managed control plane.