Certainly any cloud kubernetes will be much quicker and simpler. To the extent you can use minikube, I’d call it about the same as a vm.

For large on-prem clusters, you may have a point. I did an eval and came to a similar conclusion, but that was about five years ago. Also the question was “Can we ask customers to do this or already have this for installing our product?”. That idea was a bit before its time