First, stop digging.

Piling shit on top of shit doesn't make less shit. It just makes a bigger pile of shit.

Putting a hard puzzle box inside of a simpler puzzle box doesn't make it easier to solve. Now you have two puzzle boxes to deal with.

Docker is almost never the proper solution. Kubernetes is certainly never the proper solution, and is seldom even a net benefit. You haven't actually reduced the complexity of anything inside, you've just made it so that when something does break, and it will, you have to deal with both the problem and the Docker container. Worse, what often breaks is the container itself. The internet is full of "how do I forward a port through Docker?" questions, which should give you a pause to think.

The same applies to Flatpak and Snap and any other sort of application wrappers. Chrome inside a snap has trouble accessing files in your home directory, or at least it did when I had the unfortunate experience of using it. Maybe it's fixed now, maybe it's not, but it never should have been a problem in the first place. Basic things should always just work but the whole point of containers is to make basic things not work like they normally do under the misguided notion that this makes it simpler or safer somehow. It may make it simpler to set up the first time under ideal conditions with no special settings assuming nothing has changed or broken, but it makes it far more painful when any little thing does inevitably break.

We've had automation all along. Did you forget that Chef and Ansible exist? Did they actually save you time either? Probably, if you were managing dozens of identical servers. Probably not if you had three servers.

The most ridiculous case is when a company is using Docker to deploy its own custom software to some trivial number of servers. You made it overcomplicated. You decided how it's configured. You shat on the ground and then you stepped in your own shit and now you're going around pretending like the plastic grocery bag around your shit-covered shoe is Smart (TM) and Secure (TM) and Saves Time (TM).