As someone rolling their self-hosted stuff via Compose and shell scripts instead of K8s specifically for the simplicity of the experience, this is 100% why you need to understand what Kubernetes solves before writing it off entirely.

I'm not doing overlay networks, I'm using a single bare-metal host, and I value the hands-on Linux administration experience versus the K8s cluster admin experience. All of these are reasons I specifically chose not to use Kubernetes.

The second I want HA, or want to shift from local VLANs to multi-cloud overlays, or I don't need the local Linux sysadmin experience anymore? Yeah, it's K8s at the top of the list. Until then, my solution works for exactly what I need.