They use it for inflating their resume for career progression rather than actually evaluating if they need it in the first place.

This is why you get many folks over-thinking the solution and picking the most hyped technologies and using them to solve the wrong problems without thinking about what they are selling.

You don't need K8s + AWS EC2 + S3 just to host a web app. That tells me they like lighting money on fire and bankrupting the company and moving to the next one.

Often the alternatives presented as cheaper to me in discussions are actually burning money.

But given how I always see "you don't need k8s because you're not going to scale so fast" I am feel like even professional k8s operators have missed the fundamental design goals of it :/ (maximizing utilization of finite compute)