I agree with your sentiment. I think a more apt metaphor than Kubernetes in its entirety would be comparing it to a Kubernetes ReplicaSet[1]. I can see some similarities there.

For fun, to expound on your analogy, maybe it's like comparing an airport to a hospital. They both feature a person you check in with (triage/ticket counter) to direct you to an appropriate room/gate depending on your needs, but the core mission of each are rather different.

[1] https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/re...