> [Kubernetes…] Managed clusters could make things easier, but they aren’t cheap. That would defeat the initial motivation behind retiring moana.

Kubernetes is perfectly fine running on a "cluster" with a single node / this seems to be under the misconception that k8s requires >1 node. It doesn't, though obviously a single or two node cluster will not maintain a majority if a node goes down. For self-hosting, though, that might be perfectly acceptable.

(My own self-hosted server was a single-node k8s cluster.)