(And yes, I'm aware that there are technically ways to install things to the live runtime in Fedora and OpenSUSE, but those levers aren't obvious to most users for a reason.)
The trade offs are almost certainly worth it for a k8s host but having to run a privileged container in nerdctl to run a normally ubiquitous sys admin tool (eg, smartctl, ethtool, etc) will never not feel at least a little dirty.