To replace Kubernetes, you inevitably have to reinvent Kubernetes. By the time you build in canaries, blue/green deployments, and rolling updates with precise availability controls, you've just built a bespoke version of k8s. I'll take the industry standard over a homegrown orchestration tool any day.
We've used ECS back when we were on AWS, and now GCE.
We didn't have to invent any homegrown orchestration tool. Our infra is hundreds of VMs across 4 regions.
Can you give an example of what you needed to do?