Great post.
ClusterAPI never got the love that it should. I spent a good amount of time on it at VMware, as Tanzu heavily leverages it for cluster deployment (mostly CAP-A and CAP-V). It's basically kubeadm + the spirit of Terraform, Kubernetes controller edition. There's lots of great enterprise-ready options for centralized k8s cluster fleet management these days, but it works really well for folks that are all-in on GitOps and such.
Thank you so much! There are certainly a plethora of options for Kubernetes cluster management. We see Cluster API as a vendor-agnostic way for us and our customers. Perhaps one day we'll more tightly integrate Kubernetes and the Oxide control plane, but gotta start somewhere.