Now, in every thread, people replay arguments from close to a decade ago that reflect conditions 90% of companies wouldn't face today.
I agree, but it's important to stress the fact that things like etcd are only a pivotal component if you're putting together an ad-hoc cluster of unreliable nodes.
Let that sink in.
Kubernetes is a distributed system designed for high reliability, and depends on consensus algorithms to self-heal. That's a plausible scenario if you're running a cluster of cheap unreliable COTS hardware.
Is that what most people use? Absolutely not.
The whole point is that none of the main cloud providers runs containers directly on bare metal servers, and even their own VPS are resilient to their own hardware failures.
Then there's the whole debate on whether it's a good idea to put together a Kubernetes cluster running on, say, EC2 instances.