This year I redid my whole lab as well and prioritized declarative everything so it'd be easy to go from scratch if needed. So I've got nix to create RKE2 images with cloud-init for XCP-ng templates, Terraform with XenOrchestra provider, and ArgoCD for the K8s cluster.

I've got two R640's so I can live migrate, and an R720XD with TrueNAS (democratic-csi for K8s persistence). QSFP (40Gb) for TrueNAS / R720XD, and SFP+ (10Gb) for R640's linked to a Brocade ICX 6610.

So I can update the hosts, and K8 nodes with 0 downtime. Do I need it? No, but I learned a lot and had / have fun deploying and maintaining it.