I think the complexity is the main source of people thinking it's "crappy". It certainly my main issue. E.g. I've built orchestrators from scratch smaller than some k8s configs I've worked on. However they were special purpose - they worked well for the specific type of loads, and for that they were suitable because their tiny size meant they were easy to tweak, but they'd have been totally inappropriate as a general-purpose alternative to k8s.

And so even though I don't like it much, I think it's fine to default to k8s for people (including at my current day job), and the default will always get a lot of crap because the default choice will get pressure to include all kinds of functionality that makes it more complicated in order to support all of the very diverse workloads that don't - and likely never will - justify a custom solution.