In some sense, Kubernetes is just a portable platform for running Linux services, even on a single node using something like K3s. I almost see it as being an extension of the Linux OS layer.
Yep, this is the way. Linux is just a platform for running services on one or more computers without needing to know about those computers individually, and even if your scale is 1, it's often easier to install k3s and manage your services with it rather than memorizing a bunch of disparate tools with their own configuration languages, filepath conventions, etc. It's just a lot easier to use k3s than it is to cobble together stuff with traditional linux tools. It's a standard, scalable pane of glass and as much as I may dislike kubectl, it's worlds better than systemctl and journalctl and the like.
This may be familiarity bias, but I often find `kubectl` and related tools like `k9s` more ergonomic than `systemctl`/`journalctl`, even for managing simple single-replica processes that are bound to the host network.
Systemd seems to be moving in that direction, the features are coming together to actually enable this.
Though imagining the unholy existence of an init system who's only job is to spin up containers, that can contain other inits, OS images, or whatever ..... turtles all the way down.
