Will my sysadmin skills make learning Kubernetes easier?

I don't think system admin skills will be much help. Using Kubernetes isn't much like system admin. The whole point of it is to automatically manage a ton of resources. Pods are even more cattle than VMs, and infinitely more disposable.

A lot of the solutions to pod problems is to let kubernetes restart them. System administrators work to prevent problems.

Pods are also typically single purpose, rather than general purpose like a bare metal machine. System admin knowledge isn't required.

I don't think you need to unlearn a lot, but you do need to accept a different mindset, that of horizontal scaling and disposablility.

There's tons of people, me included, who run a server as a hobby. Almost nobody runs kubernetes as a hobby. It's like Hadoop - only corporations can love it.

They won’t hurt