Its very different though, you don't tell it the steps to do, you tell it the world state, kubernetes figures out how to transition between changes between states and if something breaks it tries to fix it by going back to the state its supposed to be in. I think this immutable/indempotency aspect of kubernetes is a bit underappreciated, this can't possibly be compared with ansible.
Further, the workload /just moves/ to another node. In the old ways, the service was tied to the node it was on. If a disk failed, the service failed. Now, within moments, that service moves and the node can just go away. It’s almost magic. I think the reason k8s doesn’t make much sense in a home-lab setting is due to the limited nodes.
IMO and IME stateful apps on k8s are still a PITA with lot of corner cases that can have really bad consequences. But as time passes, it's getting better.
Puppet was/is declarative, or at least tried to be (unlike Ansible). Don't get me wrong, I completely understand tje differences with K8S and I'd rather accept "the inner loop" as the biggest differentiator.
