Engineering is dictated by the problems you are given to solve, not the other way around. There are many valid situations in which well engineered solutions will have a developer running an entire kubernetes cluster.

For a dead simple example: You may want to do this if the team is small enough that your developer is also your QA engineer... because you can't test the entire application if you're not running the entire application. There are likely hundreds of other reasons too.

To suggest that "any technology with >3 interconnected components is bad engineering" is naive.