I thought about doing that for a while too. I think the value in the init+job+watcher approach is you don't need to depend on a framework being smart enough to

I thought about doing that for a while too. I think the value in the init+job+watcher approach is you don't need to depend on a framework being smart enough to lock things which makes it suitable and safe to run with any tech stack worry free. It also avoids potential edge cases if a framework's locking mechanism fails, and an edge case in this scenario could be really bad. But it does come at the cost of a little more complexity (a 30 line YAML job and then ClusterRole/ClusterRoleBinding resources for RBAC stuff on the watcher), but fortunately that's only a 1 time thing that you need to set up.