This has shades of the "worse is better" Unix+C vs Lisp debate - Unix+C won despite doing things "wrong" because it did them simpler, faster, and more debuggably than Lisp.
Kubernetes is like POSIX. It's a simple product at its core: there's a distributed global state exposed over an API and control loops to update that state. The complexity comes from all the networking and auth and storage rules that people shoehorn in on top.
My only complaint with K8s is that it tries to help with some of that instead of declaring it all to be out of scope and delegating it to plugins, because that's how we got the "K8S is too complicated!!!!" discourse.
jsonnet? It would be nice if kubectl had native support but even without it find jsonnet incredibly useful and we use it extensively.
