[Glyptodon]

I think the reason a lot of people create zero node clusters is that they want to "turn off" their cluster without destroying its current configuration or state, which otherwise doesn't seem possible.

I may be missing something here, but my guess is that a lot of people turn to GKE to learn how to use K8s, and then are like "wait, I'm in the middle of this project/tutorial/etc., but I don't want to be billed overnight when it's literally just going to be doing nothing, what do I do?" and find Stack Overflow or something recommending you just scale it to zero. See questions like this: https://serverfault.com/questions/877619/turn-off-a-cluster-...