I love the standalone kubelet/static manifests pattern. It's ideal for edge type stuff and really simple systems. Here's a talk on my CNC control software running in my shop with just the kubelet, no control plane: https://developers.redhat.com/devnation/tech-talks/kubelet-n...
It's also super handy for writing out static Pod manifests to have replace the brain-damaging Ignition as a less stupid alternative to cloud-init