Hot take: the default "we'll just run our own Kubernetes" in startup life stems from the fact that we are afraid of architecture. In the "nobody ever got fired for using..." we've added this behemoth of complexity and overhead.
In the late 10s, I made a not insignificant amount of money by helping startups either avoid k8s entirely or moving them off of it. Maybe it was moving to managed k8s, or maybe it was moving to something more "old skool" like ec2. The deployment process becomes more clear, the development process becomes less hairy, and we don't have to have multiple teams of SREs just trying to keep our infrastructure up.
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