Precisely, the dependency we're talking about here is "just" leveraging Kubernetes as a generic extensible control plane which makes it quite convenient to plug into for management of resources.
+1 we really wanted to leverage the ecosystem and have something that is immediately familiar when we decided to use kube-apiserver (and etcd) for crossplane. I think the K8S resource model [1] goes well beyond container orchestration
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RmHXdLhNbyOWPW_AtnnowaRf...