> The people that work on upstream k8s in Google (Tim et al) have a pretty limited overlap with the Google Cloud people that run GKE.

I happen to be in the building so I sat in on an engineering review for a proposed new GKE feature today. Tim was there, as was Brian Grant, and pretty much everyone else you've heard of (in the room or on the VC). There were also a good number of PMs, SREs, and the leads/engineers working on the GKE machinery.

Thus I have to respectfully disagree.