More general one would wish that Kubernetes had a few extra ways to get images, so you could grow on a scale from "minimal infrastructure" to "fully CI/CD". Starting with just sending the image in the RPC itself or even just on local disk (you figure out how to get it there), all the way up to registries with tightly controlled versioning.

It's possible to do that, as kubernetes only passes the image information to CRI.

You can also setup a separate service to "push" images directly to your container runtime, someone even demoed one in Show HN post some time ago I think.