The problem is I can't give it directly to developers. I don't want to be constantly writing/maintaining abstraction layers over CF to make it half decent. You may as well use Terraform at that layer of abstraction because at least it frees you of some lock-in and has more sane state tracking (which too is pretty abysmal but we aren't talking about a high bar when comparing to CFN) but I digress.

You seem to be missing the point here, it's not that you can't do things with CFN, you can. The point is k8s allows me to administrate a system that puts all of the machinery behind a nice unified API that all of my developers can consume without requiring an SRE to make every change and be there to hand hold them through setting up a new service.

It may be more complex but that complexity quickly pays off with the amount of stuff now solved in a self service manner. Sure some stuff needs to get much better, there are poorly understood primitives like Service and Ingress that could do with better docs to help explain to devs when you should use one and why.

Overall things are much better than the "AWS as an abstraction" way where everyone is clamouring to use some half baked AWS garbage service rather than just doing the old tried and true thing (screw Kinesis for example).