How does this relate to my point that you're transitively paying somebody else to do ops for you? Maybe google's pricing model rolls this into the normal VM price? Or maybe it's currently offered at a loss to gain traction? Or are you saying they are not paying the SREs anymore and they work for free now?
Per their pricing, GCP doesn't charge for the master node VM that does the orchestration - you just get charged the normal price for VMs as if you'd provisioned them yourself. Thus, given the price of GKE is $0, the only thing I could see you "transitively paying somebody else" is experience - Google engineers become more versed in running managed Kubernetes and you don't. If the fee you perceive is dependency I'd agree - but I'd also opine that many startups/SMBs would be willing to accept that fee rather than onboard engineers to solve it.
As to why they're taking the loss on the master node VM, I don't know. I had previously expected that it was a cost and was quite frankly pleasantly surprised that it wasn't - it seems like the most obvious sell. If I had to guess as to why it's not my best assumption would be that there's far more to be gained in getting companies comfortable with scaling and from angles that go beyond just the strict monetary benefit of them going from 3 compute instances to 300.
