i set up a kubernetes cluster 1 year ago at work and a private one last weekend.

last year took, i think 2 days. my private one was up and running within ~1h, including writing the ansible role to first install binaries/dependencies and join the cluster as a worker node.

either you didn't use kubeadm to set it up or ... i have no idea how you could've possibly failed.

its pretty much

    (all) ${packagemanager} install docker-ce kubectl kubelet kubeadm
    (master) kubeadm init -> prints token
    (node) kubeadm join ${token}