When you are coming from old sysadmin world and you mastered unix systems architecture and software - what k8s does is very straightforward because its the same you already know.
K8S is extremely complicated for huge swarm of webdevs and java developers that really reqlly dont understand how the stuff they use/code really works.
K8S was supposed to decrease the need for real sysadmins but in my view it actually increased the demand because of all the obscure issues one can face in production if they dont really understand what they are doing with K8S and how it works under the hoods.
I think you're right for small clusters, you end up needing more sysadmins. But to manage 1000 node Kubernetes cluster, I suspect it can be done with less administration
Im managing 20000 vcpus infra both k8s and plain vms. IMHO there is no big difference there. It all depends on the tools you are using around orchestration.
In my experience having good sysadmins is still the key to best infrastructure management no matter the size of the company.
K8S is extremely complicated for huge swarm of webdevs and java developers that really reqlly dont understand how the stuff they use/code really works.
K8S was supposed to decrease the need for real sysadmins but in my view it actually increased the demand because of all the obscure issues one can face in production if they dont really understand what they are doing with K8S and how it works under the hoods.
Which I find hilarious.