I can't see how Kubernetes belongs to this problem. It's just the tool for getting specific things done, not some kind of silver bullet. You can build your application layer around Kubernetes, leveraging its primitives and integrating your services tightly, or you can leave it as be (wow).
I currently maintain few clusters with managed control plane for hosting some monolith apps. Just a couple of fat worker nodes for failover, ingress with nice metrics and benefits of containerization... and that's it. No need to push for fully decoupled microservice architecture with service mesh that eats more CPU than your app (sarcasm, but not so far from the reality). Just use your tool right.
