Thats true. The reason I like k8s is once you've gone up the learning curve you can apply that knowledge to cloud deployments, on prem, or in this case VPS.

The authors stack left me thinking about how will he re-start the app if it crashes, versioning, containers, infra as code.

I've seen these articles before... the Ruby on Rails guys had the same idea and built https://kamal-deploy.org/

Which starts to look more and more like K3s as time goes on.