It appears the issue was running pods for deployment colors not in use if they only deploy 1/week, and this solves it because they are cleaning them up regularl

It appears the issue was running pods for deployment colors not in use if they only deploy 1/week, and this solves it because they are cleaning them up regularly. This does nothing for the overhead of needing lots of pods to support a high number of deploys/week. You could do the same with $Color, just seems to be clearer since people often think of $Color as being static deployment infrastructure, whereas people are used to SHA's pointing to branches that are naturally cleaned up.