This is true. Really annoyed that arm as a hole isn't being utilized like it could be by really anyone but apple. We could be making arm Linux powerhouses that sip power like a mid tier x86 laptop. The worry by some is that there is now way to do this without having every component solderd on, but dell has already made a new open laptop ram slot standard that has almost the same latency as Apple's soldered ram.
Arm is the future, and needs to be treated as such more than it is.
I found that for my use case (jellyfin, gitea, portainer, nextcloud, adguard, ...) the pis are still nearly idle but the bottleneck for me was ram. Anyone with similar experience?
Sounds like k3s would be right up your alley, it's API compatible with k8s but has a lot less overhead than k8s, designed for use on low power devices like the Pi.