The whole promise of Kubernetes (and, coincidentally, containers) is that you are not locked to a platform/provider/OS.
Reading this comment made me realise that often new technology is adopted because it is optional and promises options. But those options quickly shrink away and suddenly you’re locked into it.
Not to invoke a controversial name. But this is what happened with systemd.
Yes! You are not locked to a platform/provider/OS. Your GKE cluster operates more or less like your EKS cluster operates more or less like your cluster in Azure, DigitalOcean, etc. Kubernetes is a deployment platform you target and complaining that the things two layers under the hood of that are different is a false analogy.
Moving from one Kubernetes Provider to another is not zero time. You need to learn some differences in the way GKE ingresses vs AWS ELBs work, etc. It is a substantially more tractable problem than the differences between Cloud Bigtable and DynamoDB, and that one is still a tractable problem.
The way to fight lock-in is is not, and has never been, "These two providers offer exactly the same service". It has been about avoiding "These two providers offer nothing that is analogous, and their documentation is directly written to encourage using practices that do not port". It has never been an all-or-nothing thing.
Reading this comment made me realise that often new technology is adopted because it is optional and promises options. But those options quickly shrink away and suddenly you’re locked into it.
Not to invoke a controversial name. But this is what happened with systemd.