Honestly, If you are eiving into Kubernetes, just add some more of those 1L PCs in there. I tend to find them on ebay cheaper than Pi’s. Last year I snagged 4x 1L Dells with 16GB RAM for $250 shipped. I swapped some RAM around, added some new SSD’s and now have 3x Kube masters, 3x Kube worker nodes and a few VMs running a Proxmox cluster across 3 of the 1L’s with 32GB and a 512GbB SSD each and its been great. The other one became my wife’s new desktop.

Big plus, there are so many more x86_64 containers out there compared to Pi compatible ARM ones.