What's the benifit?

there are few imo:

- trustless code execution on someone's hardware (kube32 supports gpio permissions, amongst other stuff) - your standard Kubernetes cluster can now reach the physical world natively - OTA updates at arbitrary scale - fault-tolerance in the physical world, orchestration of workloads based on physical proximity or other sensor data

those are just a few that come to mind

None of this needs the overhead of k8s

Exactly, and I discarded the idea of porting k8s, building k8s-compatible system instead. It still carries some overhead, yes, and I'm yet to measure it fully, but it's a good trade-off for the applications it unlocks. If we remove the overhead form equation, do you think the capabilities I mentioned are unlocked with k8s-like system, or do you have a way to achieve all of them at the same time using something else in mind?