@daviwil Yes. I shared the the same conclusion until recently.
Kubernetes comes in many flavors: kind, minikube, k0s, k3s, k8s, crossplane, ...
Its components such etcd or containerd are simple. Complexity is added by the resources that can be described (see Helm Chart of the Grafana Stack) and the overall ecosystem (see CNF projects).
What rrally made it work for me is the fact that Kubernetes (as a technology) enables interoperability between cloud service providers (KaaS).