Well, if you're planning to run a single-node container server, then K8s is probably an overkill compared to Podman Quadlets. You just choose the lightest solution that meets your requirement. However, there was a noteworthy project named Aurae [1]. It was an ambitious project intended to replace systemd and kubelets on a server. Besides running containerized and baremetal loads, it was meant to take authenticated commands over an API and had everything that was expected on K8s worker nodes. It could work like K8s and like Docker with appropriate control planes. Unfortunately, the project came to an abrupt end when its main author Kris Nova passed away in an unfortunate accident.

[1] https://aurae.io/