The legit use case for companies like Google/Amazon etc is only to sell it to customers. None of these companies use K8s internally for real critical workloads.

Ehm, that is simply not true. Google built it for themselves first. It is essentially the open source version of the internal architecture. It gets used.

I worked at google. k8s does not really look at all like what they used internally when I was there, aside from sharing some similar looking building blocks.

Yeah, but is the internal tool simpler? I'd be surprised.

Simpler to use? yes. Simpler under the hood? No.

Also Amazon definitely uses k8s for stuff.

Teams are free to use EKS internally.

Google uses Kubernetes' grandpa, called Borg, for everything.

But to quote someone: "you are not Google".

I said “something like k8s” above, and Google for sure uses something like k8s called Borg.

Yes, it is Borg. Not k8s. Granted it is similar