alt Hacker NewsSRE here, my thought is "Sure, Docker Compose is great for production assuming your needs are light and Docker Compose works well for you."
K8s as small time is overkill for sure but make sure you don't fall into this trap. https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern...
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I spun k3s up with a config that I used an LLM to write. It's been almost 2 years. Thing just works for the most part. Even useful on a single node.
That's mostly my take as well. I'm a big proponent of having separate teams for ops/deployment/sre from app development when you make the jump to k8s though. There's also a few bridge or in-between options for most cloud services as well.
To me, if there's generally fewer than 10 actual active users at any given time and/or you can easily tolerate 30-60m of down time now and then... I'd lean into the simpler option of docker-compose. While I generally think of compose as a dev tool first, it's definitely useful sometimes.
Just the other day, someone was asking me if I knew of any options for replicating externaldns for Docker Compose. They didn't want "all the complexity" of running k8s, but wanted the features. This person was absolutely on the way to "building a Kubernetes".