"On metal" is muddied too. I've heard people refer to web apps running in an OCI container as being "bare metal" deployment, as opposed to AWS or whatever hosting platform.
That's silly, but the idea that "local" is not the opposite of remote is even sillier.
If you do bare metal as not being under a VM it fits. OCI on linux is cgroup so that counts as not a VM I'd say. Or at least it's a layer closer to the metal than a typical VM running OCI images.
You can run an OCI container on bare metal though. It doesn't stop being run on bare metal just because you're running in kernel namespaces, aka docker container
Lots of people were advocating for running their k8s on bare metal servers to maximize the performance of their containers
Now wherever that's applied to your conversation... I've no clue, too little context ( ｡ ŏ ﹏ ŏ )
Bare metal in the context of running software is a technical term with a clear meaning that hasn't become contested like "AI" or "Crypto" - and that meaning is that the software is running directly on the hardware.
As k8s isn't virtualization, processes spawned by its orchestrator are still running on bare metal. It's the whole reason why containers are more efficient compared to virtual machines
Of course, a process running inside Kubernetes Pod, on a baremetal node will show up in `top` if I run it on the node directly. In such terms, it is running directly on hardware.
But when I deploy this Pod, I'm not interacting with the OS in any way. I'm interacting with Kubernetes apiserver, telling it what to run, not really caring about the operating system underneath. In such terms, the application is running "in k8s".
This discussion made me realize that I have a head canon definition of "bare metal" that applies more to the programming environment than the deployment environment. It would exclude any runtime translation to the native instruction set, such as a VM, bytecode VM, language interpreter, etc. Basically identical in meaning to "static compilation", so I'll update my brain to the conventional meaning.
That's silly, but the idea that "local" is not the opposite of remote is even sillier.