My workplace has primarily switched all net new ci/cd workflow from Jenkins to Drone (https://github.com/drone/drone - Drone is a Continuous Delivery system built on container technology.). Having managed masters with 20,000 + configured jobs I agree that Jenkins is a very sore spot for our entire pipeline. We’ve had greater success with increasing the number of masters (one per team or application) and using the kubernetes plugin for slaves. However, most of our pipeline complaints have been mitigated by getting teams to migrate from Jenkins to Drone.

While I don’t think Drone currently supports k8s job, it is very lightweight in comparison to Jenkins. Most of our developers would agree that it isn’t a perfect product, but it has reduced friction points by a large amount.