This strikes me as an attribution problem e.g. Within large companies business units are treated as standalone financial entities so you are either making money or a cost center. I think what could be happening here is that the kubernetes group is generating what look like un-paid-for costs, instead of being back-credited for ALL of the compute they are selling via the worker VMs. I would argue that people come to GCP for GKE which means it should be seen as a revenue generator, in that light it makes sense to hold the loss leader of the control plane open and 'free' to grow GKE as quickly as possible. This decision is bad for business.