I agree that complexity is the problem and I’m avoiding Kubernetes like the plague. I set up a nomad cluster in a few days and it just works, has service discovery, and is perfectly simple to understand.

I think Kubernetes gets a bad rap out of ignorance. You can make it as complex as you want, but you can also keep things trivial and simple if that's what your aiming for.

Case in point, I operate a Kubernetes cluster with microk8s. I got my nodes up and running in a one-time setup, and after this all I need to do is kubectl apply -k to get my apps deployed and running. Each konfiguration script is trivial too. ingress, services, deployments. That's it. A docker compose script is far more complex and hard to maintain than that. Where's the complexity?

Honestly, have you ever gave kubernetes a try? If you did, what exactly did you tried to do? I bet that if you do an honest apples-to-apples comparison with any setup that you believe works, you'll notice that you're doing far more work to achieve the same result. This is a given as you're pointing out nomad of all things as something simple.