I'm in the same camp. I think a lot of these anti-k8s articles are written by software developers who haven't really been exposed to the world of SRE and mostly think in terms of web servers.
A few years ago I joined a startup where everything (including the db) was running on one, not-backed-up, non-reproducible, VM. In the process of "productionizing" I ran into a lot of open questions: How do we handle deploys with potentially updated system dependencies? Where should we store secrets (not the repo)? How do we manage/deploy cronjobs? How do internal services communicate? All things a dedicated SRE team managed in my previous role.
GKE offered a solution to each of those problems while allowing me to still focus on application development. There's definitely been some growing pains (prematurely trying to run our infra on ephemeral nodes) but for the most part, it's provided a solid foundation without much effort.
A few years ago I joined a startup where everything (including the db) was running on one, not-backed-up, non-reproducible, VM. In the process of "productionizing" I ran into a lot of open questions: How do we handle deploys with potentially updated system dependencies? Where should we store secrets (not the repo)? How do we manage/deploy cronjobs? How do internal services communicate? All things a dedicated SRE team managed in my previous role.
GKE offered a solution to each of those problems while allowing me to still focus on application development. There's definitely been some growing pains (prematurely trying to run our infra on ephemeral nodes) but for the most part, it's provided a solid foundation without much effort.