In my work, absolutely yes. Using Kubernetes has saved us sooo much nonsense. Yes we have a mix of Terraform and k8s manifests to deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service, but it works out pretty well in the end.
Honestly most of the annoyance is Azure stuff. Kubernetes stuff is pretty joyful and, unlike Azure, the documentation sometimes even explains how it works.
Kubernetes cluster changes potentially create issues for all services operating in that cluster.
Provisioning logic that is baked into an image means changes to one service have no chance of affecting other services (app updates that create poor netizen behavior, notwithstanding). Rolling back an AMI is as trivial as setting the AMI back in the launch template and respinning instances.
There is a lot to be said for being able to make changes that you are confident will have a limited scope.
Does Kubernetes infrastructure also not require some form of configuration?
Yes, there is a trade off here. You are trading a staggeringly complex external dependency for a little bit of configuration you write yourself.
The Kubernetes master branch weighs in at ~4.6 million lines of code right now. Ansible sits at ~286k on their devel branch (this includes the core functionality of Ansible but not every single module). You could choose not to even use Ansible and just write a small shell script that builds out an image which does something useful in less than 500 lines of your own code, easily.
Kubernetes does useful stuff and may take some work off your plate. It's also a risk. If it breaks, you get to keep both of the pieces. Kubernetes occupies the highly unenviable space of having to do highly available network clustering. As a piece of software, it is complex because it has to be.
Most people don't need the functionality provided by Kubernetes. There are some niceties. But if I have to choose between "this ~500 line homebrew shell script broke" and "a Kubernetes upgrade went wrong" I know which one I am choosing, and it's not the Kubernetes problem.
Managed Kubernetes, like managed cloud services, mitigate some of those issues. But you can still end up with issues like mismatched node sizes and pod resource requirements, so there is a bunch of unused compute.
TL;DR of course there are trade-offs, no solution is magic.
Fair, I was just pointing out that there was more to the analogy. Systemd, like init, also requires configuration, though it is more declarative than imperative, similar to k8s. Some people may prefer this style and consider it easier to manage, however, I my opinions here are not that strong
Wouldn't the hundreds of lines of finicky, bespoke Ansible/Chef/Puppet configs required to manage non-k8s infra be the equivalent to this?