Is it still the issue with GKE NEGs? NEG is "network endpoint groups" which basically means that Load Balancers deal not with nodes, but with pods directly. So

Is it still the issue with GKE NEGs? NEG is "network endpoint groups" which basically means that Load Balancers deal not with nodes, but with pods directly. So LBs can know what state the pod is. You can even avoid using Ingress (instead, annotate your k8s Service with neg name, and use backend service for that neg in LB), so it'd be possible to combine k8s and non-k8s services under the same Load Balancer, e.g. for migration. But I'm afraid NEG or not-NEG, LB still relies on health checks anyway, so it doesn't matter.