The real reason everyone is moving off Kubernetes for smaller workloads

It's not that Kubernetes is bad. It's that the cognitive overhead required to operate it safely is fixed and independent of the scale of your workload. You need to understand pods, services, ingress, configmaps, secrets, RBAC, network policies, HPA, PDB... just to deploy a single stateless web app. For a 20-person startup serving 10k users, that's a genuinely bad trade. Fly.io, Railway, Render, and even EC2 with a deploy script have a fraction of the operational surface. The failure modes are simpler. Debugging is faster. K8s makes sense at maybe 50+ engineers or when you have operational requirements (specific scheduling, custom resource types) that flatly require it. The 'industry standard' narrative is mostly large-company engineers pattern-matching from their previous job.