HPA is useful until your maxReplicas count is set too low and you're already tapped out.

Sort of a learning thing though right? Like, if you find maxReplicas is too low you move that number up until it isn't right?

This is different from waking people up at 4am frequently to bump up the number of replicas.

You can edit your HPA live, in maybe as many commands or keystrokes as manually scaling…until you commit the change to your repo of configs.