As a maintainer: some issues take longer to triage than others. Especially if they are not CRITICAL, and there's a huge holiday season in the midst of it. :)
I know I have been involved in a couple which took time to agree on a "best" solution and to find people to tackle them.
Define "killing kubernetes"? It's still pretty successful and the adoption hasn't slowed in any way I can measure. I promise you that some site you used TODAY is running, at least part of it, on Kubernetes.
Google employees regularly get promoted, at all levels, based on their OSS work - Kubernetes and other projects. We have dozens of people who work on Kubernetes, in one area or another, at varying degrees of depth. Is that "killing" the project?
Of course it is never ENOUGH. I'd happily consume hundreds more people. :)
This was, literally, one of the arguments for building and releasing kubernetes. The rise of Hadoop made it much harder to justify MapReduce being different.
If we just talked about Borg, but didn't ship code, someone else might have set the agenda, rather than Kube.
Autopilot and Fargate are VERY different solutions to similar problem statements.
Autopilot puts compatibility & transparency at the front. It IS GKE. It is integrated in all the same ways GKE is integrated. There's no black box between you and kubernetes, but you are absolved of the need to manage nodes, which most people REALLY don't want to care about.
Like it or not, nodes are part of the k8s API in many ways. Rather than swim upstream against that, I think Autopilot strikes a very good balance.
I know I have been involved in a couple which took time to agree on a "best" solution and to find people to tackle them.