I think both of you are correct.

Of course, a process running inside Kubernetes Pod, on a baremetal node will show up in `top` if I run it on the node directly. In such terms, it is running directly on hardware.

But when I deploy this Pod, I'm not interacting with the OS in any way. I'm interacting with Kubernetes apiserver, telling it what to run, not really caring about the operating system underneath. In such terms, the application is running "in k8s".