‘Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms’[1]. This statement, while simple and powerful, has likely contributed to the panoply of over-engineered solutions.
Looking back, this phenomenon started to take off with the publication of the Google Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) book and gained significant momentum as Kubernetes became more stable and widely deployed in production. This is in no way an indictment of Kubernetes; it is a solid solution for the problems it was designed to address. The failure is mostly in people understanding the context of the solution and determining if it aligns with their problems.