Best to just bite the bullet and install kubernetes itself I think. Currently I'm at the point of figuring out how to customize a Fedora CoreOS image to boot from PXE or USB and auto-install itself on bare metal with kubernetes already installed in the image.
The current environment for that is a Fedora Server install on one of those old PCs with enough environment manually bootstrapped to have the tools to customize Fedora CoreOS in a VM.
Consul + Nomad makes for an excellent home lab setup, using docker, podman, raw binaries, etc, as you observe. It strongly recommends 3-node cluster, but works fine on a single host if you don't need the distributed / HA aspect. We've been running it in production at work for a couple of years and it's been rock solid.
The big problem with Nomad is that it's not as popular as k8s -- so while you can leverage docker hub, there's fewer oven-ready packs for more complex systems, eg cortex metrics or mimir, as current challenges for us.
Hashicorp is building up a public repository [1] which is great to see, but it's a long way from having the same scope as the collected repositories of helm charts.
[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-pack-community-registry
Between CNI, Consul Connect, and Traefik, we have hit some stumbling blocks, but nothing we can't do, yet.
As to dynamic load, yeah, we've mostly been using Nomad for HA -- are there some surprises in store when we start playing with the autoscaler?
I think kind wins the simplest but microk8s might be a close second
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-a-local-kubernetes-with...
If part of your objective is to learn how to build a k8s cluster then I’d recommend building it with kubeadm. If you just want to get something working, k3s or microk8s could fulfill your needs.