To replace Kubernetes, you inevitably have to reinvent Kubernetes. By the time you build in canaries, blue/green deployments, and rolling updates with precise availability controls, you've just built a bespoke version of k8s. I'll take the industry standard over a homegrown orchestration tool any day.

The amount of tools and systems here that work because of k8s is signficiant. K8s is a control plane and an integration plane.

I wish luck to the imo fools chasing the "you may not need it" logic. The vacuum that attitude creates in its wake demands many many many complex & gnarly home-cooked solutions.

Can you? Sure, absolutely! But you are doing that on your own, glueing it all together every step of the way. There's no other glue layer anywhere remotely as integrative, that can universally bind to so much. The value is astronomical, imho.