Having worked on on-prem K8s deployments, yes, you can do this. But getting it to production grade is very different than a garage-quality proof of concept.
I think OP's point was: but how much of that production grade woe is the fault of Kubernetes versus, sure, turns out booting up an PaaS from scratch is hard as nails. I think that k8s pluggable design also blurs that boundary in most people's heads. I can't think of the last time the control plane shit itself, versus everyone and their cousin has a CLBO story for the component controllers installed on top of k8s
