Almost certainly it's the propagation of the kubelet checkins rippling through etcd's accounting system[1]. Every time these discussions come up I'm always left wondering "I wonder if Valkey would behave the same?" or Consul (back when it was sanely licensed). But I am now convinced after 31 releases that the pluggable KV ship has sailed and they're just not interested. I, similarly, am not yet curious enough to pull a k0s and fork it just to find out

1: related, if you haven't ever tried to run a cluster bigger than about 450 Nodes that's actually the whole reason kube-apiserver --etcd-servers-overrides exists because the torrent of Node status updates will knock over the primary etcd so one has to offload /events into its own etcd