At the moment I'd say that Kubernetes is only worthy the effort if you have a bunch of idle capacity in your nodes and some tens of machines at least.
The setup can get a bit complex quite early and won't be worth the effort to manage 8 nodes, when you begin to scale to around 20 nodes running a bunch of different workloads (batch jobs, web services, etc.), can avoid provisioning on the application side, etc., then k8s begins to shine more and pay back the investment.
Two clicks to get 1-1000 nodes on GKE. The work is to learn the yaml syntax and the way to deploy to GKE... but most apps need to learn something about how it will be deployed (be it how to use ansible to deploy vs how to setup on k8s vs how to use serverless). But you need to do this for 1-1000 nodes, may as well just do it once...
The setup can get a bit complex quite early and won't be worth the effort to manage 8 nodes, when you begin to scale to around 20 nodes running a bunch of different workloads (batch jobs, web services, etc.), can avoid provisioning on the application side, etc., then k8s begins to shine more and pay back the investment.