[evancordell]

I don't think it's quite as bad as you're suggesting. Operators are control-plane, your other examples are data-plane. You can also only run one Deployment controller in a kube cluster, but many Deployments. And you can run many controllers for a single CRD, see the Gateway APIs for example, but it's not as common and is more work.

That said, I do think the direction that Kube has gone with CRDs, by leaning into making them more like built-in apis instead of allowing them to be differentiated as an external extension point has limited what you can do with them.

When ThirdPartyResrouces just carved out a group and a name in the API it was simple to have multiple copies and multiple versions running together in a cluster. But that has become more difficult with time, especially with ConversionWebhooks - a feature that forces all controllers for an API to agree not just on a version, but on the specific ways versions convert into each other.