Something much, much, simpler. I'm not convinced that /for most companies/ k8s adds enough value when compared to all the added complexity (not to mention the yaml soup!).
Working for a small startup that uses both k8s and more traditional infrastructure, I've found the yaml soup that comprises a reliable k8s system is not much worse than the yaml/hcl soup of our ansible/terraform provisioning scripts.
The best thing is that unlike ansible's horrible text-templated yaml soup (though kudos to them for making text templating indentation-aware unlike Helm), the fact that with k8s YAML is optional and I can use things like Jsonnet, CUE, any random programming language to build manifests with full reasoning about objects, makes it much nicer than most.
I find Ansible simple: it's just a way of sending over the wire idempotent commands. It's like bash scripts, but better. On the other hand, k8s is a best of hundreds of heads.
I don't like running all my stuff with yaml. We have to introduce templating and then things get messy. There needs to be a simpler, declarative way to share values, variables, etc between k8s types.
