This seems very post-hoc and like they're fortunate they happened to arrive at something better rather than worse.

The justification for K8s seems pretty thin. It makes me wonder if the author understands why they need it. I'm guessing it's because they've got substantial parallel, multi-tenant networking of stateful processes, which is a pretty defensible reason to use K8s. And easy to say. It seems strange to leave it out.

The argument against Temporal also seems invalid, but I'm not certain. It has been years since I used it, but wouldn't it be possible to poll for completion? It seems like you'd wind up with better observability/retryability tooling, and it's much simpler overall. Polling seems like a good compromise for what I'd consider much easier tooling to reason about.

I'd also posit that you could model a lot of this using your own serializable state machines. They're in the JS ecosystem, so XState is an excellent option. You'd get incredible visibility into your orchestration, deep access to testing the semantics and logic you care most about, and the ability to have your entire architecture be containers on the fly with no blackbox orchestration.

Of course, I'm speculating after browsing through their website a bit and thinking about the problems they described. I'm missing a lot of context. K8s could be the clear winner.

Still, after reading this I would never use this product. I don't mean to sound unkind. I'd never trust the decision-making of the people who followed this trajectory. If I were the author I'd take this down ASAP.