I don't think it's about dreaming to be Google. K8s is pretty easy to set up now with a hosted cloud platform if you start with it, and helm takes care of pretty much all your infra needs. Migrating to K8s is what's awful. From there, the docs have most everything you need to know and there's an abundance of helpful information online that covers most problems you'll run into.
The number of startups for whom that performance differential matters more than developer output is tiny.