Kubernetes is the React of devops. You wont get fired for picking it. And there will be a tonne of support available online, as well as courses, and experienced people you can hire. Also there is cloud managed k8s which takes most of the pain out of it. And plenty of out the box stuff.
It is not a bad choice if you want to do the ops yourself for some reason. If you don't then use a BaaS or PaaS, that might be easier and probably not much more expensive, but will lock you in.
This has always been my observation/thought as well. It’s “ no one ever got fired for picking IBM” all over again. Cute advertisement slogan, but it’s based on a true/real mentality, and a dangerous one at that (in terms of reaching potential and managing burn).
It is like asking for something between vanilla JS and React. Or something between zipping your src folder and git.
The problem is, while this is in theory good, the weight of knowledge and support for React (and git) make it worth putting up with a bit more complexity. That support covers: Stackoverflow, Colleagues, New Hires, Cloud Support of these things (Vercel for example using both Github and React!)
You learn the tool, then you are set for 10+ years, probably, in both cases.
In the Kubernetes case, the killer thing is it very easy to set up a cluster on cloud platforms. I am not so sure about say Docker compose or the other ones. I am in the Azure world and Azure dropped support for direct container running, and now you need to use k8s if you want something cloud managed. (As far as I know).
It is not a bad choice if you want to do the ops yourself for some reason. If you don't then use a BaaS or PaaS, that might be easier and probably not much more expensive, but will lock you in.