Given that Svelte's marketing and docs now treat Svelte itself as a minor implementation detail of SvelteKit, this doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

That seems to be a strongly held position of Rich himself. He really really wants people to default to ssr with hydration, which they can only deliver with Sveltekit. The new direction they have with a new simpler rpc-like way of loading data that replaces the existing load functions, does seem like they are working in the direction of making Sveltekit simpler to work with. They don't seem like they are trending in a direction of deeper integration with one hosting vendor. Also they've always had one single abstraction for integrating with hosting options, which gives all hosting options a level playing field.