With regards to 3, isn’t the management plane alone $72 for GKE without considering the cost for the nodes? How are your costs so low?
We are running many hundreds of jobs on those peak days with only a handful running on any other day. While many bring up examples where 24/7 infrastructure from a single box is more than plenty, we find that we can run micro VMs in this configuration and not have to worry about resource contention as our jobs run.
Pre-GKE, we were managing the timing manually, which was fine until we started to scale, but we found this to be a far better situation. Particularly because we simply don't have to think about it.
YMMV.