It obviously depends on your operation scale. It’s not for small one off projects.
Discussion
That comes back to energy at the end of the day. Software can’t run without hardware, which can’t run without power. There exist no software solutions to losslessly account for this, and the complexity only increases the cost. 5 9’s & other kpi start at the power source, then continue through the hardware stack into software. Without the energy expenditure yourself, through hardware you can manage, it’s a massive larp.
Yes, few operations will be at that level; but, no, it’s not the end all be all solution.
Specifically this meme calls attention to data sovereignty & locality, so kinda non-sequitur regarding HA/LB/FO.
It's a steep learning curve but it's powerful man. My great uncle had a setup he wasn't using for anything that had 64 gb of Ram, 4 tb of storage, etc., and he said I could use it. People are open sourcing crazy stuff using Helm charts, and it's so easy to stand up your own: build server (Jenkins), image server (Harbor), email server (Mailu), whatever, after setting a few things in the config. It enables many of the services I used daily with Cloud providers like cloud storage, message queues, secrets, ECS, all run on my own servers.
Yeah it requires energy to learn it all in the beginning, but you can take your whole stack with you. The benefits are worth the learning IMO. I understand everyone might not feel that way, but I think K8 is an incredible open source innovation.