Part of the issue, I suspect, is I was blending k8s use and k8s administration by running my own k8s cluster on my own equipment--that's likely an extra layer of complexity.

(of course, the whole point of the homelab endeavor I set out on was to be fully self-hosted to learn all these underlying concetps--but definitely doesn't help that I layered some extra abstractions on top of the soup that k8s already is.)