I see what you're getting at, but in my experience at my own company, the hype around k8s didn't come from the CTOs, it came from the actual users and cluster operators. Our team adopted k8s in 2015, not because any manager told us to, but because our lead architect pushed it inside the team. Other teams started using it themselves and it became so popular that we built not one, but two Kubernetes-as-a-Service solutions in different parts of the company (in a sort of accidental grassroots situation).
That's what I mean. CTOs have more management mindset or awareness than operators. And they love and trust their engineers. That's why they couldn't resist what their team embraces. They are willing to take technical debt risk because they think their team can handle it.
There are categories of company. Yours has a dedicated team taking care of cluster, even has enough resource to make it k8s-as-a-service. Whatever hype rarely affects companies that have resources (money, human, time etc.)
But hype doesn't choose companies, it spreads and kills approaches that are more proper than k8s to a lot of companies. I'd love to see how many SMEs even need servers clustering.
