K3s is truly great - been using it for years for just about everything not warranting a full cluster. MicroK8s feels like it does too much in non-standard ways and when it breaks you're suddenly dealing with Snap related issues and it's a total immersion break.
Lately there's also RKE2 (https://docs.rke2.io/) that I've been growing fondness for and it's only marginally more tricky to setup, with the bonus effect of having a more 'standard' cluster distribution and more knobs to twist.
Not that I'd be shy of running K3s in production, but it seems easier to follow 'standard Kubernetes way' for things without having to diff with some of K3s's default configuration choices - which, again, aren't bad at all for folks who do not need all of the different options.
For edge workloads and smaller clusters / less familiar operators that want to run Kubernetes platforms themselves without depending on a managed provider, K3s is pretty impossible to beat.
From a personal perspective, I do share some of your misgivings about the appearance of sympathies with LE / authorities. It doesn't -feel- all that great to see. But at the end of the day to me it boils down to what another commenter said. If it's good enough for them, it is probably good enough for me. Someone has to pay the bills so the show can go on.
If the problem is that we're not trusting $LE_GOV_AGENCY to use the technology because it may hide abuses of authority, the root problem is that we can't trust $LE_GOV_AGENCY for reasons external to their choice of communication tooling. And that's not a problem I think we can solve with technology alone.
Plus, 'We can't allow X/Y/Z to use encrypted chat because they could do awful things' is a bit of a double-edged sword I personally don't feel comfortable wielding lest it be wielded against my own 'high-risk group'.
Disclaimer: SRE at Element, but I've been running a Matrix homeserver of my own since before I joined the company
Lately there's also RKE2 (https://docs.rke2.io/) that I've been growing fondness for and it's only marginally more tricky to setup, with the bonus effect of having a more 'standard' cluster distribution and more knobs to twist.
Not that I'd be shy of running K3s in production, but it seems easier to follow 'standard Kubernetes way' for things without having to diff with some of K3s's default configuration choices - which, again, aren't bad at all for folks who do not need all of the different options.
For edge workloads and smaller clusters / less familiar operators that want to run Kubernetes platforms themselves without depending on a managed provider, K3s is pretty impossible to beat.