This false information really needs to die. k8s is a sane choice in many cases not just hyper scale. Regular business apps benefit from rolling upgrades and load balancing between replicas. Managed k8s platforms like GKE make cluster management a breeze. Developer tooling such as Skaffold makes developing with k8s seamless. I expect k8s to continue growing and will soon take over much of the existing Cloud Foundry estate in F500 companies .
Running k8s is much harder and takes more time than just having a few VMs with docker on it. Many applications never need to scale. I really like k8s from a user perspective but it's no easy task to set up. And managed solutions don't always work for everyone (and aren't always cost efficient).
If you run the whole thing (app + k8s) then I do agree with you that it's more complex and you're likely be better off without it.
But, k8s offers a very good way to split the responsibility of managing the infrastructure and managing the applications that run on top. Many people work in medium to big corporations that have a bunch of people that are in charge of managing the compute infrastructure.
I certainly prefer k8s as an API between me and the infrastructure, as opposed to filing tickets and/or using some ad-hoc and often in-house automation that lets me deploy my stuff in a way that is acceptable for the "infrastructure guys".
