I don't have much practical experience with Kubernetes but I think one argument is that there are other alternatives to it that might give equal or better productivity gains for a lot of people.
For example Azure App Service or equivalent from the other vendors. You don't have to manage a VM.
App service is alright but I'd recommend Heroku over app service any day. However, there is some visible work being done to improve app service like supporting docker compose files to run multiple containers but the basics are still very painful.
Most notably, swapping servers (slots) always caused downtime, accessing logs was flaky and slow, azure interface is just plain slow, continuous deploy was flaky (or it just didn't kick in until 20 min later?) and I had to manually restart servers many times
For example Azure App Service or equivalent from the other vendors. You don't have to manage a VM.