There are plenty of people running Kubernetes on bare-metal. There are a number of resources out there for PXE-booting a Kubernetes cluster on bare-metal.
Yes, but the instructions that I've found to do so are based on installation via shell scripts, which I'm not comfortable with. I'd like to understand it well before running it even in a test setup.
The top result for "PXE Boot Kubernetes" is an extremely comprehensive step-by-step guide for it from CoreOS. I didn't see any magic shell scripts. The second top link is Ansible with links the constituent Ansible playbook.
If you want insight into how the pieces fit together, the learnings from Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes the Hard Way will certainly still map to bare-metal environments as well.