Maybe, but it's such a balance. I'm finally getting into Kubernetes and after years of hearing how awful it was to get it going, I was shocked at how painless it was to stand up microk8s locally and sling Helm charts at it, get Jenkins generating agents on it, get metrics from it, etc. If I were deploying something to a cloud, I would absolutely do this approach with some k8s-as-a-service provider over rolling my own machine images or having to deal with remote controlling instances using something like Ansible.

Yes, it would be possible to get sucked down a rabbit hole with over-emphasizing scaling, clustering, whatever upfront, but IMO these tools are now mature enough that it's a reasonable workflow even if you're just deploying a single instance of a container with one statically-linked binary in it.