Sure it seems complex, but we're solving insanely complex problems that didnt even remotely exist during the halcyon days of "beautiful simplicity" of the ol' Unix philosophy. That philosophy was borne out of tools to process text files. It's closest proxy in the ops world might be microservices, but if you compare the amount of labor it used to take to set up a datacenter in even something so recent at the first dotcom era, its insane what we can accomplish with a cloudformation yaml file or a terraform configuration file in a similar amount of time. The reproducability, the change management, all of it is light years better than it used to be. Every one of these 'yaml messes' all evolved out of drastically shittier shellscripts, duct tape, hope, and weekend pagers blowing up.
It might seem complex, and obtuse, but its turtles all the way down, and everything all the way back to to the original von Neumann architecture could definitely be looked at again and redesigned, but otoh, we're still doing weird shit like dividing our day into 24 hours and 60 minutes and 60 seconds for no other reason than 'its always been that way' and if we had a chance to actually design a sensible time system we could eliminate a lot of the complexity that has piled up on top of that system.
But yeah, no way would I ever want to go back to the way things were before all these layers existed.
There were just as many tools that existed during those "halcyon" days that didn't adhere to the UNIX philosophy. They just didn't tend to survive.
The one thing that hasn't changed is commercial (& ego) pressure to make the "one tool to rule them all", which has been pretty much immutable throughout the years, while on the other hand there is the reality of trying to string all of these things together.
Small, self contained tools with good APIs have persisted and will stand the test of time while the monoliths always die eventually (maybe with the exception of excel, which has really managed to cling on).
I don't think kubernetes or docker really have a bright future because they both have an ambition to be "the one tool to rule them all" and they simply can't.
It might seem complex, and obtuse, but its turtles all the way down, and everything all the way back to to the original von Neumann architecture could definitely be looked at again and redesigned, but otoh, we're still doing weird shit like dividing our day into 24 hours and 60 minutes and 60 seconds for no other reason than 'its always been that way' and if we had a chance to actually design a sensible time system we could eliminate a lot of the complexity that has piled up on top of that system.
But yeah, no way would I ever want to go back to the way things were before all these layers existed.