Because the force multiplier of a good DX way outweighs the occasional nonsense from having to do k8s upgrades or troubleshooting

For example: how do you roll out a new release of your product? In sane setups, it's often $(helm upgrade --install ...), which is itself often run either in-cluster by watching a git managed descriptor, or in CI on merge to a release branch/tag

How does your developer get logs? Maybe it's via Splunk/ELK/DataDog/whatever but I have never in my life seen a case where that's a replacement for viewing the logs

How do you jump into the execution environment for your workload, to do more advanced debugging? I'm sure you're going to say ssh, which leads to the next questions of "how do you audit what was done, to prevent config drift" followed by "how do you authenticate the right developer at the right time with access to the right machine without putting root's public key file in a spreadsheet somewhere"

I've set up and run my own physical Linux server as well as cloud ones and it may be easier to get a Linux box up and running with an application but to get it into a state I consider production ready it's much harder. With ECS (or similar offerings, I agree kubernetes can be overkill) you get logging, blue green deployments, permissions, secret management, scaling, and more built in. You don't need to worry about upgrading your server and there's a whole category of security issues you don't really need to worry about. I work in a space with some compliance requirements and I do not think we could meet them at the size that we are without offerings like this.

a few linux boxes is great when you're a solo dev looking to save money and manage things yourself, but it's a poor place to start scaling up from. not just technologically, but from an HR perspective.

Kubernetes is something you can hire for. A couple of linux boxes running all your server code in the most efficient way possible might save you operational costs, but it resigns you to being the one who has to maintain it. I've learned this the hard way - moving things to ECS as we scale up has allowed me give away responsibility for things. I understand that it's more complex, but i don't have to teach people now.