You make some great points, but I'm concerned that your preferred solutions may ignore the needs of working with peers. When I've worked with similar solutions before, we had a lot of on call, and it all went to the same person, regardless of who actually answered the phone.

There's nuance to be had in the middle ground:

• The CI/CD pipeline should deliver releases, but shouldn't be the only way to put them into production. People often get this wrong and have to invoke CI/CD to even do a roll back. Putting something into production without CI/CD should be possible, but it should be loud, to avoid nasty surprises, later.
• Infrastructure as code is great. It just happens to be backwards, today. We could all go back to point and click changes, if the infrastructure had full journaling (including who made the change) of changes and full rollback capability. Ironically, I expect k8s (or a fork of it) to finally deliver this.
• the only nice thing I have to say about K8s today is that it's not locking myself into a proprietary cloud, or worse, VMWare. Today, K8s is towering mere centimeters above even worse solutions, all of them objectively awful. I'm not mad at anyone using any of these. We all know we want the freedom of K8s, but no one wants the bullshit interfaces it currently comes with. It will get better.

Anyway, interesting read. Thank you. The only way the current awful state of hosting is going to improve is by having this conversation.

I keep hearing "most people aren't ready for K8S". But there's no such thing. There's just whether K8S (or whatever replaces it) is ready for most people's use cases.