I think you might be missing the point. You are correct, kubeadm doesn't include any components in that sense and runs them in containers. The issue with this i

I think you might be missing the point. You are correct, kubeadm doesn't include any components in that sense and runs them in containers. The issue with this is that there's a lot of overheads for each service that Kubernetes runs, causing Kubernetes as a whole to have a bigger memory footprint. K3s on the other hand combines all the necessary services and runs them in a single binary, which allows for a reduced memory footprint with very little lost in functionality. I don't know what all was involved when this was done but that is the gist of it.