You've asked. I've taken the time to write an answer. Please read it.

Acme corp loves containers as much as everyone else. Containers provide great value. However, muddling around with docker/containerd/crio without some form of orchestration is just another path to a herd of fragile, neglected pet machines.

Acme corp is very different from the Big Tech world k8s came from. Acme corp doesn't have Linux kernel contributors and language developers and an IT payroll so large that the mundane devops people are lost in the noise. Acme corp must use what prevails and doesn't mystify. The "team" managing something is frequently one person, or less.

Acme corp ends up with a collection of pet VMs, all different. Lots of stuff is containerized. Some stuff isn't. Much of it is high-value: let one of those go down and an angry so-and-so will be on the horn right now, even if they haven't noticed for weeks. Most of it is low load: there will never ever be a world where these get reworked into scalable, stateless, distributed cloud apps.

How to get from a herd of pet VMs that happen to run containers (sometimes) to an orchestrated cluster of containers?

In my imagination the answer is something that looks like a mashup of Proxmox and docker-compose. It has the following features:

-- Orchestration: micro-VMs running containers scheduled across a cluster of nodes. The "micro-VM" term deserves some definition. I don't have a precise definition. I know Firecracker is too anemic and full featured VMs are too much. The micro-VMs of cloud-hypervisor are just about right. Above all "micro" just means simple, not necessarily small: a micro-VM that needs a lot of RAM and takes longer then 0.0003 us to start is fine.

-- Live migration: low-load, high-value applications need to stay up despite cluster node maintenance and despite never becoming candidates for re-engineering into cloud native applications. This feature is the #1 reason the VM part is necessary: live-migration is a native capability of KVM et al. that works well since forever, whereas containers (CRIU not withstanding) can't be live-migrated.

-- Trivially simple support of network transparent block storage: iSCSI and other network block storage is rampant at Acme corp because it's cheap, reliable, easy and fast enough. Re-engineering everything for dynamodb or whatever isn't an option. Fortunately, because we're running a micro-VM with its own kernel that has native support for network block (The other #1 reason for the VM part) we get this for free.

-- Simple operation: if it imposes a bunch of concepts that one can't already find in docker-compose it's wrong. Acme corp doesn't have the depth to deal with more and can't find that depth even if it wanted to, which it doesn't. Grug Brained Devops: not stupid, just instinctually uninterested in unnecessary abstraction, opaque jargon terminology, overengineering and fads.

Anyhow, that's my sincere attempt to answer your question. Respectfully, if you think you know of a solution you're likely wrong: I've wormed into every corner of that which prevails and it doesn't exist at the moment. That's why I claim there is an opportunity. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but you'd have to go a long way.