Operations is always more complex than folk expect it to be and product evolution typically reflects that. Kubernetes was simple because it couldn't miraculously teleport to do all the things ever-larger clusters require of it.

We forever rush to the limits of current technology and then blame the technology.

I think it's worth noting that Kubernetes never tried hard to impose an opinion about what belongs to the operator (as in the person running it) and what belongs to the developer. You get the box and then you work out amongst yourselves where to draw the value line.

Cloud Foundry, which came along earlier, took inspiration from Heroku and had a lot of folks of the convention-over-configuration school involved in its early days. The value line is explicitly drawn. It's the opinionated contract of `cf push` and the services API. That dev/ops contract allowed Cloud Foundry to evolve its container orchestration system through several generations of technology without developers having to know or care about the changes. From pre-Docker to post-Istio.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we do Cloud Foundry stuff. But as it happens my current day job involves a lot of thinking about Kubernetes.