I think I live in the real world and your statement is not true for any of the projects I've been involved in. Kubernetes is absolutely used to solve real technical problems that would otherwise require a lot of work to solve. I would say as a rule it's not a webapp in a slow interpreted language that's hosted in k8s. It truly is about decoupling from the need to manage machines and operating systems at a lower level and being able to scale seamlessly.

I'm really not following on the impedance mismatch from what you're actually trying to do. Where is that impedance mismatch? Let's take a simple example, Elastic Search and the k8s operator. You can edit a single line in your yaml and grow your cluster. That takes care of resources, storage, network etc. Can you do this manually with Elastic running on bare metal or in containers or in VM? Absolutely, it's a nightmare, non-replicable, process that will take you days. You don't need elastic search, or you never need to scale it, fine. You can run it on a single machine and lose all your data if that machine dies - fine.