I've done some labbing with Swarm. Swarm is _just different enough_ to be a pain, but just similar enough to fool you into thinking you know what you're doing. Because swarm was also confused terminology (at one point there were two things with the name swarm that did things differently) the tech definitely got a bad rap for a while, but it also stagnated supporting tooling. You can use things like Portainer and Swarmpit to get some visibility into your swarm cluster members, deploy workloads, etc, but it definitely feels like a second class citizen.
Ultimately, I would love for something to exist out there that had the opinions and scope of deployment like Swarm in terms of simplicity, but didn't conflate other tools out there so that ergonomics and documentation were better and less confusing. Kubernetes gives you so much, but I do feel like it's a misstep that the only reasonable way we've simplified Kubernetes for production workflows is to pay a large PaaS to manage it for us.
Honestly with a github action and Argo CD workflow the kubernetes patterns aren't that scary. However maybe I'm just too comfortable in the ecosystem at this point.
I will say Kubernetes being as open as it is and all the overlapping tooling would seem incredibly overwhelming for someone trying to enter that space.
Ultimately, I would love for something to exist out there that had the opinions and scope of deployment like Swarm in terms of simplicity, but didn't conflate other tools out there so that ergonomics and documentation were better and less confusing. Kubernetes gives you so much, but I do feel like it's a misstep that the only reasonable way we've simplified Kubernetes for production workflows is to pay a large PaaS to manage it for us.