It's true for non-trivial cases, and exceptionally false for some things. Like databases. A lot of the sysctl tuning for large database environments has to be done on the host, either directly, allowing unsafe sysctls and restarting kubelet, running with privileges, etc.
This is not "independent of the underlying infrastructure" or "the VM and my laptop have the same kernel tunables set". They don't. And it matters.
It's true for non-trivial cases, and exceptionally false for some things. Like databases. A lot of the sysctl tuning for large database environments has to be done on the host, either directly, allowing unsafe sysctls and restarting kubelet, running with privileges, etc.
This is not "independent of the underlying infrastructure" or "the VM and my laptop have the same kernel tunables set". They don't. And it matters.