Yeah I suppose the laws currently being passed in dozens of states across the country are actually fully in support of LGBTQ+ communities and aren't in fact discrimination.
Agreed, this is one of the biggest issues I see. Anywhere you install a custom controller essentially has access to ~all of your resources. What could go wrong?
I'm not sure what you mean by too many things ended up as custom resources -- it's the recommended extension point and you can do a lot with them that you can't do with core types.
Custom resources had/have some growing pains but I think worked out pretty well. It can be very very hard to test and distribute them though. As someone who maintained a controller with paid support, your test matrix gets pretty large pretty fast accounting for different k8s versions, different hosted versions (GKE, AKS, etc), different distros (openshift, rancher, etc). And that's before you even get into specific configurations like pod security policies, can the control plane communicate with the data plane, is there a service mesh.
Resource versioning is hard to get right. Once a resource type is v1, it becomes difficult to extend it. You can't add a beta field to it easily. Revising schema can be hard since anything more than a no op conversion between versions requires a webhook, which requires a certificate chain, and while cert-manager is popular it is not ubiquitous and regularly has breaking changes. Webhook setup issues made up a large portion of our support requests.
As far as the general "reconciliation loop" architecture goes, you end up with something similar in most orchestration systems I've worked on, or you wish that you did. So overall I think that worked out well. Getting it right can be hard, but I think that's the nature of the beast.
If you're using a tag like centos:8 that gets updated periodically, you already do not have reproducible builds. This just ensures you get updated packages as soon as possible
Remember there are multiple supreme court cases just this year about trans people's right to both be trans and employed. That's part of what is meant by "existence being political".
That depends on if your existence is political I suppose. Ask some of your LGBT colleagues, especially trans colleagues, if they feel like can just leave politics at the door.
https://www.kut.org/austin/2020-03-18/judge-throws-out-city-...
Though granted this law was passed previously and wasn't a reaction to something Austin did a la TNC regulation