TIL about Talos (https://github.com/siderolabs/talos, via your github/onedr0p/cluster-template link). I'd been previously running k3s cluster on a mixture of x86 and ARM (RPi) nodes, and frankly it was a bit of a PiTA to maintain.
Talos is great. I'd recommend using Omni (from the same people) to manage Talos. I was surprised how easy it was to add new machines with full disk encryption managed by remote keys.
cannot praise talos highly enough, it makes so much annoying crap easy
No shell in the OS? Seems insane but interesting at the same time..
Practically, its not a problem as you can always create a privileged container and mount the root filesystem into it. I have an alias I use for exactly such things.
kubectl-node-shell is also pretty good to do that automatically.