k3s does not taint its server nodes. Unlike a kubeadm cluster, a k3s control-plane node has no node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane:NoSchedule, so it is schedulable and ordinary workloads land on it. On my Pi cluster I found regular pods sharing the control-plane node with the k3s server.
A regional ESSD disk on Alibaba Cloud replicates data synchronously across zones in the same region, so the volume survives a single zone going down. I only just learned you can back a Kubernetes PersistentVolume with one, which gives a stateful workload real cross-zone durability.
When a pod has no shell (distroless or scratch), you can still get inside it
with an ephemeral container instead of rebuilding the image: