Can somebody give me(/HN) a TL;DR of how this differs from existing OSs targeted for Kubernetes, like GCP's Container-Optimized OS?

https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/

The big difference seems to be removing SSH. I understand the theoretical rationale, but in practice it seems like this would complicate troubleshooting quite a bit. Yes, maybe you shouldn't be SSHing into prod ever, but how do you keep the environment consistent if you do want to allow SSH in dev/test?