[gorkish]

Yeah I really don't understand why they went this direction as it builds considerable additional complexity directly into the application to solve a problem with an external component

I would have probably approached this by implementing a fix for the misbehaving part of k8s, though since there isnt a default LoadBalancer in k8s, I can't really can't speculate further as to the root cause of the initial problem. But most CNI or cloud providers that implement LB do have a way to take feedback from an external metric. I'd be curious why doing it this way wasn't considered, at least.