[escardin]

I would argue that an ingress is not a barrier to getting started with k8s (even with kubeadm on bare metal). You don't NEED an L7 router to get started. Much more likely is you need a LoadBalancer. An ingress is only going to help route traffic that is already in your cluster.

If you deploying to almost any cloud provider they have an implementation for you. If you're on bare metal, you have to make that choice yourself.

Even if you're hosting yourself you don't technically need a load balancer, you could use host ports, or node ports and it would work for some definition of work. I have in the past set up an ingress to listen on host ports of every node and it works well, if a little janky.

I'm surprised you're complaining about this which is an easy thing to replace and not your choice of network plugin, which can result in having to reprovision the cluster or similar if you want to replace it with something different.