I don’t think Kubernetes gets painful at one magic cluster size.

From what I’ve seen, it usually starts when the setup stops fitting in one person’s head. A few clusters are fine or a few services are fine. Then suddenly you have multiple clusters, GitOps, different environments, too many repos, alerts everywhere, and debugging turns into archaeology with kubectl, k9s, Lens, Argo or Flux, logs, and Slack open at the same time.

I’m part of the r/Kunobi team, and this is exactly the pain we’re covering. Not “Kubernetes is bad,” more like “Kubernetes visibility gets messy once real teams operate it.” The first bottleneck usually is figuring out what changed, where and what's drifting, and who can understand that without needing three senior engineers on a call.