To loosen up AWS-entrenched customers and their much more varied use-cases, probably.

I've long wondered if K8s is really a dastardly scheme to hold back the industry …

It's basically impossible to release this kind of internal tooling due to the way Google works. You'd have to rewrite it, or open-source essentially the entire foundation, and Google probably doesn't want to do either.

It's a ninja smoke bomb to distract the tech world into thinking we are cool like Google.