A lot of smaller SaaS companies avoid k8s like the plague and only start using it once they scale to a certain size. K8s might be ubiquitous past a certain scale, but there are many jobs operating below the threshold for which the complexity of your system with k8s outweighs the complexity of your system without k8s.
If you find yourself on the Google cloud for some reason, GKE Autopilot is such a great hands-off solution that most alternative solutions will probably be more complex.
I only recently had to use AWS EKS, and am pretty sure that many people dislike k8s because that's the main incarnation of it they experience (how is there no pre-installed ingress, and even the setup for their own load balancer is a 10+ step manual process?).
It is really weird that the AWS Load Balancer Controller isn't an EKS Addon, and the permissions requirements being in the base requirements for EKS. Also, the only officially supported CNI is the VPC CNI.
And if you want to use EKS-A (EKS-Anywhere) it's even more effort to do the AWS IRSA setup.
Installing an ingress controller that will do SSL is a steep cliff preventing use with so many cloud Kubernetes offerings. I don't know why it needs to have dozens of steps, roles, and resource definitions.
Yeah, though I have to admit that even though you get SSL certificates "out of the box" with a GKE + GCP load balancer setup, their provisioning has always been really slow for me (usually 1-2h, sometimes half a day). In comparison self-installed nginx-ingress + Let's Encrypt provisions in minutes.
Cloud Run is just Knative which is also Kubernetes, so in the end it comes out to about the same. I used to use Cloud Run, but in the end there were usually always some things that ended up making GKE the more convenient choice (e.g. access to Helm charts).
