I'm proud to say I retired more k8s clusters than I created. And I've created 5 production ones, still in production.

One that I retired was used for serving ftp(among other transfer stuff), ftp of all things, it needs to have ports open and routed back from the client. And for extra points they had the pods capped at 1 cpu. And I had to explain the thing to the perpetrator and their boss, madness.

It's also much easier to bring online these days with managed offerings like GKE, EKS, and AKS.

I have no love for the original bash scripts that booted the cluster from your dev machine.

Now we also have k3s that is a easy option for self hosting something simple (like homelab).