We're also ignoring Kubernetes and are just using GitHub Actions, Docker Compose and SSH for our CI Deployments [1]. After a one-time setup on the Deployment Server, we can deploy new Apps with just a few GitHub Action Secrets, which then gets redeployed on every commit, including running any DB Migrations. We're currently using this to deploy and run over 50 .NET Apps across 3 Hetzner VMs.
The amount of complexity people are introducing into their infrastructure is insane. At the end of the day, we're still just building the same CRUD web apps we were building 20 years ago. We have 50x the computation power, much faster disk, much more RAM, and much faster internet.
A pair of load-balanced web servers and a managed database, with Cloudflare out front, will get you really, really far.
[1] https://servicestack.net/posts/kubernetes_not_required