Ansible/Teraform are portable. I don't see it's usage as a failing, rather as avoiding DO lock in.

Agreed with the rest though. This is quite the ask.

I'm a big fan of Kubernetes, and for larger projects the flexibility and power it brings is unrivalled. But for smaller projects, assuming equal levels of competence, delivery teams using managed Kubernetes are almost universally later and have more issues than teams that use simpler solutions. Container-as-a-service solutions like GCP CloudRun or AWS FarGate help somewhat, but are not cheap for a given amount of compute time.

Terraform (or IaC in general) absolutely has a place, because even if you use Kubernetes, most projects have more infrastructure to manage than just the cluster - at the very least, lemmy.world has a CloudFlare proxy to manage - and clicking buttons in a management portal is not a repeatable way of deploying that, or deploying the Kubernetes clusters themselves.

Ansible also has a place, particularly if you're deploying onto bare metal. I wouldn't use it for new deployments unless I had bare metal to configure and maintain, but lemmy.world is deployed onto a bare metal server as I understand it. Plus, the most effective tooling is generally the one your team understands.

IaC is the right move. It transfers complexity, it necessarilt doesn't add it. It makes your deployments reproduceable and automated.

Which is a baseline to having highly available infrastructure. Not everyone will be familiar, or have the right mindset for that sort of DevOps.