It's not about skill and approachability; it's about not having tens of thousands of systems in different companies built out of hacks and science experiments, where experience isn't portable and every system's hacks and idiosyncrasies need to be learned anew. K8s raises the abstraction level on deployment of a multi-node application architecture.
Further, as it builds out standard abstractions for external services, it should enable applications to be written agnostic as to the specific cloud provider. That's pretty valuable. It has the potential to reduce AWS's lock-in advantage.
Yes, I'm aware and you're preaching to the choir. I'm literally the lead on $employer's k8s deployment. I was just pointing out that things like k8s can absolutely be done reliably with old school bare metal and config management + some orchestration glue. Only it isn't as simple for most and generally is done poorly. I'm a huge fan of k8s.
Further, as it builds out standard abstractions for external services, it should enable applications to be written agnostic as to the specific cloud provider. That's pretty valuable. It has the potential to reduce AWS's lock-in advantage.