"in production" can mean different things to different people and it's about marketing yourself. Build a side project, find the cheapest method to running kunbernetes, run it there for a while. Try to itterate. Do the CI/CD thing. If it's publicly accessible, it's in production. Check out k3s for a minimal experience.
I too have worked at organizations that have been configured like this. I speculate that pressure on the limited IPv4 allocations has caused many places that had previously been configured with large public IP blocks, to sell sub-allocations, for profit. NAT certainly does enable this practice but isn't the root cause. Sell those IPv4 blocks for $$$ -- who needs their laptop getting a public IPv4 address anyway?