There is no doubt that Kubernetes popularity is growing very fast. I base my opinion on the trend I noticed in London since 2018, but a quick search on Google will confirm that.
My first experience with Kubernetes was in early 2017, when I attempted to create a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, and honestly I got discouraged at the time. That was before discovering Kops, and I wasn't ready to move to GCP (which actually would have been a good choice).
For the reason that I found Docker Swarm easier to install on AWS, I gave up on Kubernetes for a while. But things have changed since then, and starting from late 2018, all major cloud providers, including AWS, offer a managed Kubernetes service.
Eventually, I decided to recycle my previous experience and use Vagrant and Ansible to provision a standalone Kubernetes cluster for development.
But we already have Minikube, so why would I do that? My opinion is that Minikube is good, but it doesn't support all the interesting configurations which I want to test.
I need a Kubernetes environment which is like an actual cluster, but still runs on my laptop.