At a previous place we set up a cluster on AWS. This was before EKS. We started out with kops initially but later used the generated CFN yaml. It was not an easy feat. There was a lot of gotchas, moving pieces and much more. All of these moving pieces had their own gotchas. Plus lots of competition in the area with not a lot of comparisons since it was early days. Many things were not fully stable. A lot of issues. We got there in the end, but it wasn't easy.
On the flip side, we were able to onboard people with their services in days, not weeks (previously the company ran their own datacentres). Teams were allowed to go to AWS directly, or go to our K8s cluster. I was able to observe the lead time of 3 teams, 2 chose k8s, 1 chose AWS. Those going to K8s were able to get their prod environment running within a week. The other team took a month to do their dev environment. All three teams deployed a single stateless service.
This is obviously anecdotal, but I was really impressed with the user friendliness of kubernetes for the consumers.
Nowadays, 4 years later at my current company, it's a different story with every major provider managing the clusters for you. At my current company we haven't taken the jump yet, so unfortunately I can't fully compare, but the little I've played with EKS, it's as easy as simple crud operations.
