Do you work on k8s professionally outside of the project you’re talking about?

5 mins seems unrealistic unless you’re spending time somewhere else to keep up to speed with version releases, upgrades, etc.

I think it sounds quite realistic especially if you’re using something like Talos Linux.

I’m not using k8s personally but the moment I moved from traditional infrastructure (chef server + VMs) to containers (Portainer) my level of effort went down by like 10x.

I would say even if not using Talos, Argo CD or Flux CD together with Renovate really helps to simplify the reoccuring maintenence.