That's a real good point you mentioned: k8s ecosystem is super young.

And so so much changed in the last 4 years.

But at least for me, the 'easy to use' threshold happend somewhere like 2-3 years ago.

And Gardner for example upgrades quite well.

Rke2 is quite stable for me but rancher integration is still not perfect.

But even doing k8s by hand with Ansible was already double 3 years ago. That's what I started and I had it up and running. I switched to rke2 because I realized that this will not be sustainable/ is not worth it to do it myself on this level.