I've been a K8s user for some time, but it does drive me bat shit crazy. My main beef with it is I often cannot discern the logic of how things work. For the developer platforms and systems I enjoy working with, you are presented with primitive axioms that you can then bootstrap your knowledge upon to derive more complex ideas (e.g., any decent programming language, or OS). K8s does not work that way -- at least as far as I can tell. A priori knowledge gains you nothing. When I run into a problem on K8s, I copy/paste the error into a search engine and I am presented with a 200 message long GitHub issue with users presenting their various solutions (how does this command relate to my original problem, who knows?), some work, but most of the time, they don't and you are left in a bigger hole than when you started. I end up tearing the whole things down and starting over, most of the time. That last comment is the biggest "code smell" for me with K8s. When it is easier just to nuke the thing and begin again, there is a problem.
I'll put blame on bad documentation and tutorials becoming the norm for k8s versus what was common early on, because k8s is very much about building more complex ideas from primitive axioms. The whole resource model is built around simple ideas being used to build more complex ideas.
Wish there was some better docs out there, not sure if I could handle writing one from scratch :/
