I was settled on Docker-Compose and Ansible for a long time, and while it was indeed quite easy to use once everything was tweaked correctly, what finally got me to move to k8s was HA. Having a single node with nginx, DNS resolution and Unifi controller running on it meant if I ever took the node down down for something, everything broke. Plex being down because I wanted to play with something unrelated wasn't ideal.

Agree that Ceph is ridiculously overkill though, I tried. Longhorn is much easier and perfectly fine for distributed storage.