I think one important point is that we have nutrition labels mandated by regulation so that consumers can see how much sawdust is in the rice crispie they're buying.
The logical extreme would be no regulation at all and expecting consumers to scientifically test every rice crispie they buy to determine the amount of calories in it.
Kubernetes is great for single nodes! It definitely is more advanced than docker compose, but it's actually not hard at all if you read through the documentation. It definitely makes running containers easier in the long run.
Here is my git repo for my big Kubernetes cluster at home: https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/custom_applications
It started out as just a NFS server and a Kubernetes server running on Proxmox in 2021.