It is currently 10 cents an hour flat rate for the control plane. That actually saved us money. Even if you weren't going to run in HA, that is still the cost of a smallish machine to run a single master. I am not sure who running K8s in production would consider that too high. If you are running at the scale where $72 a month is expensive or don't want to run HA, you might not want to be running managed Kubernetes. I'd just bootstrap a single node then myself.

You said it yourself: production at scale is the only place where the current pricing makes sense. That's fine, but it means I'm not going to be using Amazon k8s for most of my workloads, both k8s and non-k8s.

If you cut out the Kubernetes hype, you could simple use AWS' own container orchestration solution (ECS) whose control plane is free of charge to use.