What are your thoughts on "Pods are not meant to be created directly"?

Pods are usually indeed not created directly. You'll notice that Pods are usually created as part of another entities such as Deployments or ReplicaSets.

If a Pod dies, Kubernetes will not bring it back. This is why it's more useful for example to define ReplicaSets that will make sure that a given number of Pods will always run, even after a certain Pod dies.