As someone who does a decent amount of devops by day, this type of project is interesting to me as it allows me to quickly see how things are set up, and if I can learn anything from it.
I deployed this using https://k3s.io/ which takes 5 min to set up. Moreover, I use Kubernetes in my job everyday so the complexity wasn't there for me.
Funny, I had a junior engineer stand up a notification service. They used terraform and Lambda, had it all scripted. It was cool. Took him all day to do it.
Me... wrote a one line bash script that ran on a cron. Done in a minute.
But mostly, it's because people who complain about k8s have never spent longer than a week setting up their container constellation properly on docker.