Unless you have money to burn K8s excels compared to VMs in my experience.
It's original purpose wasn't to do elastic scaling or anything like that - it was to binpack workloads onto a set of nodes, and not everyone has Silly Valley money to pay Silly Valley prices (especially when one's currency is weak against dollar)
Considerable portion of the internet, even people who supposedly know k8s, have this weird notion that it's for "scaling up" ... Except they never talk about scaling what single engineer can do, but some less useful things like dynamically adding lots of servers ;)
It's original purpose wasn't to do elastic scaling or anything like that - it was to binpack workloads onto a set of nodes, and not everyone has Silly Valley money to pay Silly Valley prices (especially when one's currency is weak against dollar)