It’s not that bad if you need to deploy at least 3 things and for most cases it beats the alternatives. You can get away with a bootstrapped deployment yaml and a couple of services for most scenarios. What should you use instead? Vendor locked app platforms? Roll out your own deploy bash scripts?

Sure the full extend of Kubernetes is complicated and managing it might be a pain, but if you don’t go bonkers is not that hard to use it as a developer.