The big difference in my opinion is that your ad-hoc servers using static binaries, with all the outside stuff specific to your organization, are non-standard.
For some miraculous reason K8S is ubiquitous and everybody uses it. Standardization is a boon.
People complain about git using similar arguments, and yet having a vast majority of the tech world on it is a boon for tooling.
Both those technologies are excellent but take some time to master (you don't have to be an expert though).
I can get on a project using git, kubernetes and say RoR and understand it very quickly without help. It is well bounded. It takes a git account and a kubeconfig. All set.
A custom python codebase deployed on custom servers running in big enterprise-y network, not so much.
For some miraculous reason K8S is ubiquitous and everybody uses it. Standardization is a boon.
People complain about git using similar arguments, and yet having a vast majority of the tech world on it is a boon for tooling.
Both those technologies are excellent but take some time to master (you don't have to be an expert though).
I can get on a project using git, kubernetes and say RoR and understand it very quickly without help. It is well bounded. It takes a git account and a kubeconfig. All set.
A custom python codebase deployed on custom servers running in big enterprise-y network, not so much.