It's possible that those platform engineers did a poor job exposing kubernetes to the developers, in the anecdotes you've mentioned. But there is a LOT more being instrumented in an effective deployment platform than just deploying an app somewhere. Centralized logging and metric aggregation and then visualization of those is an important aspect to any platform for app deployments that get overlooked by many naive developers. Deploying a service to some PaaS site is great until you need to extract any runtime information out of it, if it doesn't also instrument those features, which I've been a consumer of many of them that don't really do that at all. And then performant and reliable shared cluster storage is another animal altogether in on premise kubernetes clusters in particular. So far my best experience in that area has been with Ceph, which is like learning a completely different distributed system with its own complexities.

The app developer doesn't see it, but behind every decent app deployment in kubernetes, there are millions of hours of expertise in running distributed applications reliably. And the simpler deployment platforms do a good job of abstracting some of this, but from what I've seen nobody does all of that exceptionally well, and if they did, they could probably be able to charge whatever they wanted to people wanting to use it.