You have this with literally every deployment mechanism, except with Kubernetes the boundary is standardized and you can easily find/hire/teach new team members to work on the complicated parts.
Custom VM/cloud/$randomSaaS deployments are much worse when it comes to "the one guy who understands the intricate details is on vacation".
Of course, if your deployment mechanism needs to be complicated, standarizing on something everyone knows is useful.
The underlying assumption behind my comment is that you really really want to simplify your deployment as much as you can.
Unfortunately this is nearly impossible with the currently accept set of standard best practices for developing web applications, where you use a scripting language and like six different database systems (one for source of truth on data, one for caching, one for full text search, and who knows what else everyone is using these days; I honestly can't keep track).
There are many ways to make the deployment process simple. My rule of thumb is to use a compiled language (Go) and an embedded database engine.
Custom VM/cloud/$randomSaaS deployments are much worse when it comes to "the one guy who understands the intricate details is on vacation".