I'm not really clear on the complaint. Is it immutability or not? I'm not saying delete the cluster and start over, I'm saying i can yank a node or destroy a container without (much of) a consequence. Talos is immutable similarly to nix afaik

I guess the complaint is that with resources being immutable, the only standard & recommended way to deal with a problem is to take the resource out.

I know that is the whole point of sheep vs pets but it somehow became the "did you restart the pc" version for operations.

There's only small parts of the typically used parts of the kubernetes api that are immutable and those have good reasons. So I'm still not really sure what issue you're describing.