[fathead_glacier]

Managing state is hard and always has been regardless of the underlying technology.

I have been using Kubernetes for a few years now and whenever I see people putting manual steps they should instead be using an operator. What the author is describing as a problem has a solution (they even added it to their own operator).

Kubernetes has a steep learning curve but if you want to do nontrivial thing like have state than you need to learn nontrivial things like operators.

The default controllers that come with Kubernetes do not cover everything under the sun and they do require extensions via the operator pattern for some tasks.

Just my two cents.