This is just the law of inertia at play. Big projects slow down. K8s isn’t just the K8s core, it’s a massive ecosystem, and when taken as a whole it’s unbelievably vast and growing at an amazing pace. As it does, the core of it moves slower, there are more stakeholders, more arguments. Small changes make for big problems and not everyone can be happy. Patches will keep coming, major changes will become eventually impossible. The death of Kubernetes makes for great clickbait, but most of us won’t see it in our lifetimes. Not when our banks run on 60 year old code. Kubernetes is too big to fail at this point.<p>As far as FAANG promo committees go, let them value what they value. Kubernetes is a direct revenue driver for many companies; it’s health is tied to billions of dollars in investments. Just because one cohort of contributors age out, cash out, or fall in love with someone doesn’t mean there is no one to take their place. The new people won’t do it the same way and that is okay, even great. I’m grateful for the vision and effort that have make K8s the platform it is, and if I can translate that into a contribution in the future I will.<p>Finally, I’ll say that people who really love working on the project may not get support to work on it full time, but then may find themselves able to retire sooner than many and have ample opportunity to contribute.