S04: Post-Kubernetes Realism

Kubernetes turned ten in 2024 and the retrospectives are finally honest: the field won, federation lost, most multi-cluster projects were a category error, WASM isn't going to replace Docker in 2026, and the platform team that was supposed to abolish the ops silo mostly just rebranded it with a Backstage portal on top.

This is not a "Kubernetes is dead" series. It's a "Kubernetes actually won, now let's talk about the shape of the real thing" series, written for the architect who's past vendor slogans and wants to know what the credible 2026 stack looks like after the hype deflates.

The through-line: This is the contrarian-authority arc. Every article picks a fight with a mainstream narrative and brings receipts. The goal is not iconoclasm for its own sake; it is to name, in public, the gap between what the vendor decks promised and what production looks like.