It would be really cool to see the features in this mainlined.

Side question: I know in the article it was mentioned that they liked their signal approach to scaling because it allows them to preemptively scale. I'm just not sure why that wouldn't be achievable by scaling the replica counts of your deployments based on signals.

If scaling happens based on pending pods then just scale your pods so that they're configured to handle your predicted traffic. Then the cluster will obtain your desired state. Am I missing something?