I never got into kubernetes but docker swarm mode services (not to be confused with old docker swarm) are pretty similar and they're absolutely amazing for small deployments, even for just a home lab. If there's anything I want to self-host, no matter if it's homeassistant, jellyfin, nextcloud, a mastodon instance, a lemmy instance, GitLab or whatever, I can usually just get a preconfigured container, adjust some lines in a docker-compose.yml to fit my environment and be done with deployment in under 5 minutes without having to worry about dependencies, isolation or most configuration. Same for the stuff I write myself. Most of my stuff has a very simple GitLab CI config of maybe 20 lines and immediately shows up live when I merge my changes into main.