My day job makes this request of my team right now, and yet when trying to apply this logic to a container and cloud-native control plane, there are a lot more devils hiding in those details. Use MetalLB for everything, even if NLBs are available? Use Ceph for storage even if EBS is available? Definitely don't use Ceph on someone's 8GB laptop. I can keep listing "yes, but" items that make doing such a thing impossible to troubleshoot because there's not one consumer
So, to circle back to your original point: rke2 (Apache 2) is a fantastic, airgap-friendly, intelligence community approved distribution, and pairs fantastic with rancher desktop (also Apache 2). It's not the kubernetes part of that story which is hard, it's the "yes, but" part of the lego build
