I run k3s in my homelab as a single node cluster. I’m very familiar with kubernetes in general, so it’s just easier for me to reason with a control plane.

Some of the benefits I find useful:

• ArgoCD set to fire and forget will automatically update software versions as they happen. I use nix to lower the burden of maintaining my chart forks. Sometimes they break, but
• VictoriaMetrics easily collects all the metrics from everything in the cluster with very little manual tinkering, so I am notified when things break, and
• zfs-localpv provides in-cluster management for data snapshots, so when things do break I can easily roll back to a known good state.

k3s is, of course, a memory hog, I’d estimate it and cilium (my CNS of choice) eat up about 2Gb ram and a bit under one core. It’s something you can tune to some extent, though. But then, I can easily do pod routing via VPN and create services that will automatically get a public IP from my endless IPv6 pool and get that address assigned a DNS name in like 10 lines of Yaml.