You've basically described k3s, I think. I run it in my homelab (though I am enough of a tryhard to have multiple control planes) as well as on a couple of clou

You've basically described k3s, I think. I run it in my homelab (though I am enough of a tryhard to have multiple control planes) as well as on a couple of cloud servers as container runtimes (trading some overhead for consistency). k3s really hammers home the "kubernetes is a set of behaviors, not a set of tools" stuff when you realize you can ditch etcd entirely and use sqlite if you really want to, and is a good learning environment.