Eh? I was able to go from a docker image to live and 0 downtime deploys in a few hours?

But how many hours/days/years did it take you to learn how all the parts move before you became capable of setting something like that up within a few hours?

Anecdotally, stories of businesses abandoning entire cloud automation projects because they wasted weeks and never had anything to show from it don't seem unusual, so evidently a considerable amount of knowledge and skill is required to get value out of these tools.

None really? I don’t consider myself the worsts best Sysadmin, but the hard part was making an app docker. Making a docker k8s was easy.

This.

I used K8s and serverless tech and while serverless wasn't as simple as some evangelists try to sell it, it was at least a magnitude simpler than K8s.

Even managed K8s, which removed most of the admin plane work with nodes, was still significantly more work to get up and running.

My worry is less about getting it set up to run a container and more about securing it, monitoring it and being able to respond should things go wrong.