I've been doing keto and have more energy in general

They self host

Setting the Python Path in VS Code is not as easy as PyCharm via project structure

Is standard more expensive in reality? Any data on this, flex is certainly very expensive

Flex is not at all very expensive. Per instance cost is about 1/2 the cost compared to heroku, putting it on par with the likes of ECS in terms of cost but ships with usable monitoring, logging, and metrics out of the box with extremely generous free tiers that stay free way longer and that are still marginally cheaper than what you’d pay in AWS land if you exceed them.

UPDATE: Got some clarity, these issues are caused by "resource exhaustion" meaning there are no resources left to be allocated.

I'm curious to see if this is true.

I faced some pretty serious resource allocation issues earlier in the year. The us-west1-a region was oversubscribed. I was unable to get any real information from support with regard to capacity. Eventually my rep gave me some qualitative information that I was able to act on.

Was certainly not UI only

OK. Perhaps I misunderstood. In the status page, it says:

Affected customers can use gcloud command [1] in order to create new Node Pools. [1] https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/container/node...

That led me to believe that only the web UI was affected.

Creating clusters via the UI is still not working for me.

UPDATE: Created a Cluster successfully in Australia... Still not able to do so in the US.

Have you tried via the gcloud command?

You were able to add more Nodes to you're pool? Are you using any auto scaling?

GKE gives you a fully managed Master Node.