This issue seems to be the typical case of someone being bothered for someone else, because it implies there's no "recognition of source material" when there's quite a bit of symbiosis between the projects.
I blame this on the recent development of "open source as a marketing strategy". I'm getting tired of "open source" products that have restrictive licenses, or that are open source but lock features behind paywalls and subscription plans. It seems open source is just an excuse to ask for "stars" and to get some good will from potential users.
The Open Source world has become what the startup world became: more posers than supporters.
If you're worried that people will steal your code, your idea, or use your product for free, then don't claim it's "open source" and say "source available for auditing purposes" and start paying for contributions.
Everyone talking about Kubernetes as if it was merely a "hyperscaler" and the biggest benefit of Kubernetes over a bunch of custom scripts is consistency and the ability to have everyone work on an industry standard, which makes it easier to onboard new hires, to write scripts and documentation against, etc…
To answer your question directly: yes, that's the point. You may have different clusters for different logical purposes but, yes: less clusters, more node groups is a better practice.
We moved entire infrastructure to AWS last year, to speed up/simplify/rethink it. We lasted 3 months on S3/CloudFront. We are still heavily invested in AWS, but moved our production storage/distribution to R2/Cloudflare and couldn't be happier.
Next up: moving our cloud edge (NAT Gateways, WAF, etc) to Fortinet appliances, which licenses we purchased bundled with our on-prem infra.
I know Corey Quinn always harps on AWS' egress pricing but you really can't emphasize it enough: it's literally extortionary!
VC funding is where cool products/ideas go to die... or sell off to be assimilated.
I don't think VC funding exists if "premium support/enterprise consulting" is the monetization strategy. Either they see monetary value in the product itself and intend to maximize it (aka subscriptions, paid features, etc), or see the IP value and intend to have the business "flipped" for profit.
This issue seems to be the typical case of someone being bothered for someone else, because it implies there's no "recognition of source material" when there's quite a bit of symbiosis between the projects.