From a technology point of view k8s doesn't do anything better than what Perl scripts used to do 25 years ago.

(Not that Perl scripts are any good. They're crap technology, but unfortunately so is k8s.)

K8s doesn't solve a technical problem. It solves two contradictory social problems:

a) It gives sysadmins a job creation program, full of expensive and opaque stuff that requires expensive sysadmins. b) It makes sysadmin stuff fungible and replaceable for developers.

Solving both problems is probably an important social issue if you're running a Google scale organization. But it's solving a social and organizational problem, not fulfilling a technological need.