I much prefer configuring some minimal yaml and letting the system deal with scheduling containers. throw an operator like fluxcd in there and point it at a repo of yaml and the workflow for ops is quite nice.
I just hate debugging when k8s itself is unhappy. even with k3s where there’s no etcd, ive still had mtls certs expire (why) ultimately locking me out. at this point my personal ops have regressed to systemd units and shell scripts.