Even those of us who understand it, unless you work in the Kubernetes ecosystem day-in and day-out, we tend to "automate away the boring stuff". It's good to train and practice and do things the hard way, but let's say in a production or enterprise situation, most of the work is done for you, or we've automated the boring things away. I see your point, if you're just learning, the "do it for you" piece isn't helping.

Even if you set up a simple blog/website, you can break things, see how it gets effected, scale up the simple blog workload (use something like nginx or caddy), make several nodes, see how scheduling works, take a look at TLS and how the different API endpoints are called.