I see kube as providing a set of tools. These are plugable built-in functionalities that you can use to make a functioning application. I think the problem is that it is common to configure these directly, often with unpowerful languages like yaml.

I think they are a great set of tools. However it seems like there should be more framework on top of them to make it an easy user experience. You can argue that this is what Google has done with Cloud Run. They put a simple "run an image exposed to the internet" interface built ontop of the kube foundation.