I wish pods were fully restartable

I think “restartability” comes down to what you lose when you restart it. In case of pods, you lose logs and in case of StatefulSets or volume mounted pods, some kind of state. Apparently, Kubernetes decided that this is too much to lose if they automated it.

But I agree with OP that it should be optional to restart them automatically since in a lot of cases it’s simply a state problem. Is that a problem needs debugging so we need to keep some traces? Yes but the same goes for container restart, too. So there is a tradeoff and I can see that it’s not much different than the tradeoff we make for container restart. Write the logs somewhere before the restart for example.