The systems evolution that led us to Kubernetes does have it merits of course: I just know I can trust the simple foundations of control loop meets immutability in order to maintain complex distributed systems, including expectations for self-healing and resilience. Though IMHO the "freedom" aspect you hinted on above is the more important one these days - yet usually cloud platform dependence unfortunately creeps in, in other ways still.
Personally though I bet that for an easy 80% of "need to deploy software" cases, Kubernetes is indeed overkill - as long as it isn't "managed" / abstracted away at least to the level of a Heroku. And of course there are many other ways and platforms to benefit from "containers" and their promise (?) of independence these days.
All power to anyone though if they have the money/time/energy to put work into that layer, in addition to whatever else they are trying to achieve. Disclaimer being that learning can definitely be its own merit (that's how I got started myself) but it's important to know when it's "just" that, when it's more and when it's simply overkill.