So in reading this link where information is scarce, this seems like an alternative to minikube (e.g., bundling Kubernetes as part of Docker CE/EE). Is that the right interpretation?

FWIW, we've found minikube a bit wonky. It's resource intensive, so if you want to run more than a couple services, your laptop starts to melt. One of our open source projects is Telepresence which relies heavily on Kubernetes networking, and we definitely see more weird/networking issues with Telepresence/minikube than with regular K8S clusters.