Same here. Non Kubernetes project originated control plane components start failing beyond a certain limit - your ingress controllers, service meshes etc. So I don't usually take node numbers from these benchmarks seriously for our kind of workloads. We run a bunch of sub-1k node clusters.
When I was involved about a year ago, cilium falls apart at around a few thousand nodes.
One of the main issues of cilium is that the bpf maps scale with the number of nodes/pods in the cluster, so you get exponential memory growth as you add more nodes with the cilium agent on them.
https://docs.cilium.io/en/stable/operations/performance/scal...