You can only run a certain number of pods per node before the kernel craps out. Depending on your K8s version somewhere in the 250-500 range.

Admittedly, this is unlikely to be an issue at home lab levels. Therefore one must suspect the “because I can” methodology is at play here.

It felt like overkill to dedicate an entire NUC to running the K8s control plane. So, I split each NUC in half. Only one node is running the control plane (and, I have prevented any other workloads from running on the control node as a best practice). The other 5 nodes are available for running whatever workloads. There's probably a bit of a performance hit from running two separate OS's and kubelets on each NUC, but I'm hoping it won't matter too much in practice.