Of course things can be simpler.

Remove abstractions like CNI, CRI, just make these things built-in.

Remove unnecessary things like Ingress, etc, you can always just deploy nginx or whatever reverse proxy directly. Also probably remove persistent volumes, they add a lot of complexity.

Use some automatically working database, not separate etcd installation.

Get rid of control plane. Every node should be both control plane and worker node. Or may be 3 worker nodes should be control plane, whatever, deployer should not think about it.

Add stuff that everyone needs. Centralised log storage, centralised metric scrapping and storage, some simple web UI, central authentication. It's reimplemented in every Kubernetes cluster.

The problem is that it won't be serious enough and people will choose Kubernetes over simpler solutions.

Some people want their k8s logs to be centralized with non k8s logs. Standardizing log storage seems like a challenging problem. Perhaps they could add built in log shipping. But even then, the transfer format needs to be specified.

Adding an idp is pretty standard in k8s... What do you want to actually do different?