If that is your definition of "cloud" then most stuff running on AWS and other "cloud" providers isn't. I agree that Kubernetes and even containers aren't the end all. I think they are a stepping stone to true on demand where you have the abstraction of just sandboxed processes compiled to WASM or something run wherever.

But as of where we are now, it is a good abstraction to get there. It provides a lot of stuff like service discovery, auto-scaling and redundancy. Yes you do need to have instances to run K8s, but that is as of date the only abstraction that we have on all cloud providers, local virtualization, and bare metal. So yes it isn't true on demand "cloud" but in order to work like that you need to fit into your service provider's framework and accept limitations on container size, runtime, deal with warm up times occasionally.