The thing about managing pods using deployments rings a bell, but most official Kubernetes tutorials/examples (at least back then) were declaring "kind: Pod" directly which gave mixed signals, maybe because deployment was a newer feature. Per the service doc you linked, services connect directly to pods rather than deployments, using a seemingly magic "kubernetes.io/service-name" label.
In the deployments example, what gets me is they called 4 different things "nginx." It's hard to tell what does what. Like I've read 6 times what matchLabels does, and it's still not clear if that's supposed to mirror template.metadata.labels.app, or what happens if it doesn't. Sure I'd figure it out if I set up the real thing and messed with the config to see what it does, but it shouldn't take that.
Of course it's easy to follow tutorials without fully understanding how stuff works, and I did. Slightly more advanced things were a lot of trial and error. At some point I lost interest because I didn't really need this.
In the deployments example, what gets me is they called 4 different things "nginx." It's hard to tell what does what. Like I've read 6 times what matchLabels does, and it's still not clear if that's supposed to mirror template.metadata.labels.app, or what happens if it doesn't. Sure I'd figure it out if I set up the real thing and messed with the config to see what it does, but it shouldn't take that.
Of course it's easy to follow tutorials without fully understanding how stuff works, and I did. Slightly more advanced things were a lot of trial and error. At some point I lost interest because I didn't really need this.