You're missing the point of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is so organizations can have a standard way to deploy infrastructure that makes talent and knowledge portable between organizations. Everyone building their infrastructure from a kluge of their own scripts is not the way forward for the industry imo.
You're fair to argue then we should have a less complicated tool that's being standardized on but Kubernetes is where the industry is congregating now and that less complicated tool, that satisfies the most use cases and a high level of standardization, has yet to emerge, there have been multiple that have tried but never gained traction or outright proved to actually be more complex to manage once you go beyond small businesses.
Personally as a maturing profession we should stop reinventing the wheel for much of our tooling, adopt common tooling across as much of the industry as we can and then draft and produce standards engineers can work by so we stop having so much slop across the industry.
I haven't met two organisations that use Linux in the same way either but what it gives you is a common terminology, understanding and way of thinking.
But you have met two organizations that do kubernetes. Kubernetes may be overly flexible, but having everyone on k8s is a heck of a lot more standardized than having everyone writing their own bash files.
We've been using K8s to scale incredibly high user and revenue generating services across banks, telcos, insurers for the last half decade. Works pretty well in our opinion ;)
So, most ‘experts’ then? I try to know as little about k8s and aws as I can but because of ‘people who embellished their resume’ (I am trying to be nice here), I had to because most that had it on their resume did ‘something’ with it but not anything usable. Now I can do it myself (but hate it very much) and ask questions during interviews 99% of so called ‘k8s experts’ (…) cannot answer. And I see this now happening more and more in security as well; people ran a vuns detection script once and put security expert on their resume.
If Kubernetes is solving a problem of employees, making it easier to find jobs elsewhere, and making it easier for companies to find standard people, why are Kubernetes profiles more expensive?
Dev ops skills are expensive in general for one, but the second reason is Kubernetes is only starting to get to popularity and mass adoption. Look at the 2021 and 2022 stack overflow surveys under tooling to see the difference in adoption rates. It’s ramping up. I’d say it’ll take about 5 years or more until it’s at ubiquity and then that won’t be a hard to find skill and then not more pricey.
You're fair to argue then we should have a less complicated tool that's being standardized on but Kubernetes is where the industry is congregating now and that less complicated tool, that satisfies the most use cases and a high level of standardization, has yet to emerge, there have been multiple that have tried but never gained traction or outright proved to actually be more complex to manage once you go beyond small businesses.
Personally as a maturing profession we should stop reinventing the wheel for much of our tooling, adopt common tooling across as much of the industry as we can and then draft and produce standards engineers can work by so we stop having so much slop across the industry.