What do you use for provisioning and upgrading Kub? For monitoring it? For CICD? For access control? Image registry? Image build? The collection of these things, and everything else required for deploying and managing containers in production, is what I call a container platform.

Is kub core not working on spinning out built-in volume plugins out of the core to keep it smaller? Are the maintainers not recommending using third-party tools + 3PR for all major new features going forward?

It seems like my comment was misinterpreted as a criticism of kub, or a sign of ignorance. It was neither. I stand by my comment that nobody runs naked kub in production. That doesn't make it any less good, stable or useful. It just means it's not meant to be a complete product.