You'll fit in just fine. Most of the companies that want Kubernetes also never scaled past 100 users ;)

And the ones that did have a platform team, you just write code as if you are using a lambda or something anyway. Tend to your allotment of in-house yaml and off to the races! Unless you want to be on the k8s team. I wouldn't hate it personally.

Same, at this point it feels like doing your own k8s configuration is re-solving an already solved problem. Surely deploying software in a scalable fashion is a solved problem?

For most AWS etc. can solve it for you. At a certain scale that gets expensive enough to make reinventing wheels attractive.

It's a fifty/fifty, isn't it, part of it is actually exciting. Everytime I have a foot in a "proper" company (usually for a consulting gig), I'm always excited to learn about a bunch of stuff that I never had a moment to work with (because, as you say, it's usually a waste of time when there's less than a 100k users on it). The other part, however, is the insane slowdown of progress this usually brings with it. Everything, is, so, incred-ibly-slow at these corps. And policy and asking for permission and nobody wanting to be responsible unless upper management and and and...

Bureaucracy is real. There are often ways of surmounting that, but that takes yet another, different set of skills.