How are you using vanilla Kubernetes? I've tried provisioning vanilla K8s on bare metal clusters and I found it to be pure PITA, even with Kubespray.
Rancher's RKE is the first installer I've come across that "just works". Run rke up against a cluster.yml and within minutes you have a HA cluster with ingress ready to rock. K3S is also looking quite good.
In contrast I've spent days staring down the abyss of vanilla K8s. If you have good alternatives for launching K8S on bare metal/on-prem clusters, would be game to try.