And I thought I was being tinfoil-hat-y about Google's true motives in pushing Kubernetes so hard and the benefits of it being so popular. It enabled the first true cross-cloud experience, that Google just happens to be the creator of and have control over (no matter how much you hear that it's "community driven", the only project I've seen that is actually lives up to that is Rust). Yeah, Kubernetes is massively useful and I'm grateful, but that doesn't stop me from being very cynical about it -- the complexity and learning curve is a consultant's dream (disclaimer: I'm a consultant) and at this point it looks like a 5d chess move to improve their cloud offering by basically backdooring themselves into every single other cloud and the headspace of millions of developers.
Condolences to Crossplane[1]. Hyperbole yes, but I do not envy any companies that have to try and compete with Google in the current regulatory (captured) marketplace. If they didn't buy you but entered your space it's gotta be bad news on some level.
Luckily, the fact the kubernetes is open source and at least in some part community driven (i.e. the wide ecosystem of plugins) means that companies like Crossplane can still exist if they work hard to out-sell and out-market google, and there is a slim possibility that the barrier to creating a "cloud platform" being lowered so much might mean that all the little mom & pop shop VPS providers and bare metal providers will get in on it, and force the bigger guys to compete on price somewhat (we all know big enterprise is going to go straight to AWS/GCP/Azure anyway).
[EDIT] - I just realized that while I was harsh on Crossplane, they arguably just became an extremely valuable acquisition target for every other large cloud provider that wants to buy their way in. Probably not Amazon but Azure/IBM/Orcale/etc probably.