This is certainly the case from all the third person accounts I hear. Online. I never actually met a single one that is like that, if anything, those same people are the ones that are first to tell me about their Hetzner setups.
The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing departments of big vendors more than their own staff. Many of us have given up fighting this, because what it comes down to is a massive asymmetry of information and trust.
The challenge is convincing people that "golden images" and containers share a history, and that kubernetes didn't invent containers: they just solved load balancing and storage abstraction for stateless message architectures in a nice way.
If you're doing something highly stateful, or that requires a heavy deployment (game servers are typically 10's of GB and have rich dynamic configuration in my experience) then kubernetes starts to become round-peg-square-hole. But people buy into it because the surrounding tooling is just so nice; and like GP says: those cloud sales guys are really good at their jobs, and kubernetes is so difficult to run reliably yourself that it gets you hooked on cloud.
There's a literal army of highly charismatic, charming people who are economically incentivised to push this technology and it can be made to work so- the odds, as they say, are against you.
I think this is the crux of the matter. Also, "everybody is doing it, so they must be right" is also a very common way of thinking amongst this population.
Around the time of the pandemic, a company wanted to make some Javascript code do a kind of transformation over large number of web-pages (a billion or so, fetched as WARC files from the web archive). Their engineers suggested setting up SmartOS VMs and deploying Manta (which would have allowed the use of the Javascript code in a totally unmodified way -- map-reduce from the command-line, that scales with the number storage/processing nodes) which should have taken a few weeks at most.
After a bit of googling and meeting, the higher ups decided to use AWS Lambdas and Google Cloud Functions, because that's what everyone else was doing, and they figured that this was a sensible business move because the job-market must be full of people who know how to modify/maintain Lambda/GCF code.
Needless to say, Lambda/GCF were not built for this kind of workload, and they could not scale. In fact, the workload was so out-of-distribution, that the GCP folks moved the instances (if you can call them that) to a completely different data-center, because the workload was causing performance problems, for _other_ customers in the original data-center.
Once it became clear that this approach cannot scale to a billion or so web-pages, it was decided to -- no, not to deploy Manta or an equivalent -- but to build a custom "pipeline" from scratch, that would do this. This system was in development for 6 months or so, and never really worked correctly/reliably.
This is the kind of thing that happens when non-engineers can override or veto engineering decisions -- and the only reason they can do that, is because the non-engineers sign the paychecks (it does not matter how big the paycheck is, because market will find a way to extract all of it).
One of the fallacies of the tech-industry (I do not mean to paint with too broad a brush, there are obviously companies out there that know what they are doing) is that there are trade-offs to be made between business-decisions and engineering-decisions. I think this is more a kind of psychological distortion or a false-choice (forcing an engineering decision on the basis of what the job market will be like some day in the future -- during a pandemic no less -- is practically delusional). Also, if such trade-offs are true trade-offs, then maybe the company is not really an engineering company (which is fine, but that is kind of like a shoe-store having a few podiatrists on staff -- it is wasteful, but they can now walk around in white lab-coats, and pretend to be a healthcare institution instead of a shoe-store).
Personally, I believe that the tech industry sustains itself via technical debt, much like the real economy sustains itself on real debt. In some sense, everyone is trying to gaslight everyone else into incurring as much technical debt as possible, so that a way to service the debt can be sold. Most of the technical debt is not necessary, and if people were empowered to just not incur it, I suspect it would orient tech companies towards making things that actually push the state of the art forward.
A lot of criticism of k8s is always centered about some imagined perfect PaaS, or related to being in very narrow goldilocks zone where the costs of "serverless" are easier to bear...
They're getting kickbacks from cloud vendors. Prove me wrong.
But yeah, let's just spin-up a shadow IT VM with Debian like GP said, it's easy!
That’s literally how they sold AWS in the beginning.
Cloud won not because of costs or flexibility but because it allowed teams to provision their own machines from their budget instead of going through all the red tape with their IT departments creating… a bunch of shadow IT VMs!
Everything old is new again, except it works on an accelerated ten year cycle in the IT industry.
If you'd know Kubernetes, you know not to use it. I say that as someone who used to do consulting for it.
The reality is that yet again "making money" completely collides with efficient, quality, sane productive work.
For me one of the main reasons to leave that space is that I couldn't really deal with the fact that my work collides with a client's success. That said I have helped to get off that stuff and other things that they thought they needed, that just wasted time and money. It just feels odd going into a company that hired you to consult on a topic only to end up telling them "The best approach for you is not doing that at all". Often never. Like some people thought "Well, if we have hundreds of thousands or even millions of users" and the reality was that even in these scenarios if you went away from that abstract thought and discussed a hypothetical based on their product they realized that they'd still be better off without it. Besides the fact that this hypothetical often was in a future that made it likely that they said they'd likely have completely different setup so preparing for that didn't even make sense.
I think a big thing related to that was/is the microservice craze where people end up moving to a complex architecture for not many good reasons and then they increase complexity way faster than what they actually deliver in terms of the product, because it somehow feels good. I know it does, I've been there. When in reality the outcome often is just a complex mess with what could have been a relatively simple monolith. And these monoliths do work. And in the vast majority of cases they are easy to scale, because your problem switches from "how do we best allocate that huge amount of very different services across our infrastructure" to (for the most part) "how do we spin up our monolith on one more server" which tends to be a way easier to tackle service.
And nothing stops you from still using everything else if you want. Just because it's a monolith doesn't mean you need to skip on any of the cloud offerings, etc. For some reason there seems to be that idea that if you write a monolith you are somehow barred from using modern tooling, infrastructure, services, etc. Not sure where that comes from.