Yes it is worse, much worse. A large part of the reason for that is that it's written in Go. The other part is that it's written by Googlers and sysadmin people; two groups not particularly known for their great software engineering skills. My personal experience here is mostly with cAdvisor (which I guess is not strictly part of Kubernetes but comes from the same ecosystem). It is chock full of horrible error handling (if there is any), uninitialized structures and a dozen layers of indirection.