[BenTheElder]

author here, some background:

kind was originally built for developing kubernetes itself, as a cheaper option for testing changes to the core components.

it wasn't really meant to compete with minikube et. al, but complement for differing usage, but you may now find it useful as a lightweight option with a slightly different feature set.

it's also the only local cluster that is fully conformant as far as I know, because conformance tests involve verifying multi-node behavior, at the time minikube did not support - building kubernetes from a checkout and running it - docker based nodes - multiple nodes per cluster

These days they've gotten more similar, we're both shipping docker and podman based nodes.

I think one of the most interesting things about kind is that the entire kubernetes distro is packed into a single "node" docker image, it's very easy to work with fully offline.