Having worked in two separate teams/companies with both regular VMs (that includes AWS EC2) I think it comes to the same to the number of people needed.
I would even say that there is less work with Kubernetes, but maybe that's my preference. I don't even think that you need two full time engineers working on it constantly, or more to say, if you're working on it constantly you have bigger problems but not with k8s. Sure, you need people to own it, but the work is periodical (mostly for cluster upgrades which are too frequent IMO) and in non-toxic companies there is always good work to be done.
I would even say that there is less work with Kubernetes, but maybe that's my preference. I don't even think that you need two full time engineers working on it constantly, or more to say, if you're working on it constantly you have bigger problems but not with k8s. Sure, you need people to own it, but the work is periodical (mostly for cluster upgrades which are too frequent IMO) and in non-toxic companies there is always good work to be done.