Do you manage to aggregate all logs on a single place? Do you have the same environment as staging? How do you upgrade your servers? Do you have multiple teams deploying on their own components? Do you have a monitoring/metric service? How do you query the results of a Cron? Can you rollback to the correct version when you detect an error at production?
remote syslog has been a thing for how many years?! As has using a standard distribution for your app with a non-root-user for each app, easily wiped and set up every deploy (hint: that's good for security too!). Monitoring was also a solved problem and I guess Cron logs to syslog. Rollback works just like a regular deploy? (I wonder how good k8s helps you with db-schema rollbacks?)
Setting all of that from scratch is not really that easy, and I wouldn't consider "monitoring" to have been a "solved problem". syslog over TCP/UDP had many issues which is why log file shippers happened, and you still need to aggregate and analyze it. Getting application to reliably log remotely is IMO easier with k8s than remote-writing syslog, as I can just whack the developer again and again till it logs to stdout/stderr then easily wrap it however I want.
Deploying as distribution package tends to not work well when you want to deploy it more than once on a specific server (which quickly leads us to classic end-result of that approach, which is VM per deployment minimum - been there, done that, still have scars).
Management of cron jobs was a shitshow, is a shitshow, and probably will be a shitshow except for those that run their crons using non-cron tools (which includes k8s).
Yes, k8s makes it easier and more consistent. But it's not like all the stuff from the past suddenly stopped working or was not possible like GP made it sound ;)
