> The more you buy in to Kubernetes, the harder it is to do normal development
This demonstrates the bias and perspective of the author. The best way I can describe it is code-centric rather than system centric. If that's "normal" then the article makes some very valid points. For example, I've seen quite a few folks make the attempt to scale out badly when they could've scaled up rather easily. Very many "bigdata" problems can be handled on a single machine with a terabyte of memory.
If one shares that code-centric perspective, then yeah, k8s probably isn't for you. The real benefit in overcoming the very validly criticized complexity of k8s is the number of things that happen without intervention.
From a systems-level perspective, all these things are crucial. Services are abstracted with endpoints by default. Liveness and readiness are built in. Self-healing is built in. A consistent model by which apps are deployed is built in. Logging, metrics, and SLA monitoring while not built in can all be added and employed without intervention.
Ideally, these things abstract the infrastructure sufficiently well that it allows developers to focus on development, rather than ancillary tasks like deployment, monitoring, resilience, etc.
You can actually. Friends of mine rented one for a group camping trip a couple years back. Worked pretty well. A quick google search shows that Enterprise and Avis will both rent you one.
I'm a well-compensated white collar professional in the bay area. I drive a 23yo bigass diesel pickup that I use for offroading, towing, hauling, camping, etc.
I don't get judged hard at all. Most folks thing it's quirky. I'd say I get judged more positively than not.
In NorCal outside of the bay area there are plenty of pickup trucks and the culture that goes with that.