We use GKE.

1. I don't know about any of this; we don't seem to have problems.

2. This sounds like an architecture issue, not a k8s issue.

3. Our entire GKE infrastructure costs less than $50 a month.

4. You're right here; it doesn't work 'well', but it works 'well enough' for our use cases.

5. I'm sure you're talking about some event that was far more complex than the few times we've had to drain our pool, but we did what we needed to do without downtime in production. While annoyingly esoteric, I thought it worked pretty fucking well compared to our alternatives.