I really love Quadlet. I used to host my rootless containers on Hetzner, Ansible, SystemD and RockyLinux for years without any issues and extracted it to template repo [1].

[1] https://github.com/Mati365/hetzner-podman-bunjs-deploy

I switched my home server from k3s to quadlet and saw an 8% drop in power usage.

Well hang on a second I have two nodes running k3s. 8%??

Did you accidentally also swap out the CPU governor?

Why not? On my home server, k3s (single-node master), sitting idle (no workload, no changes), has amassed as much CPU time as a full virtual machine running Home Assistant: 17.75 hours in 106 hours of uptime.

All those abstractions and cluster features do not come for free.

I think it's an 8% drop on the previous usage, not 8% of total compute drop.