What are the trade-offs between RKE2, K3s, and kubeadm for on-prem Kubernetes?

[DanielT]

I'm tasked with setting up a new on-premise Kubernetes cluster for our development and staging environments, and I'm evaluating whether to use a managed distribution like RKE2, K3s, or roll our own with kubeadm on bare metal. Our team is small but growing, and we need something stable and maintainable without a huge operational overhead. For those who have gone through this decision, what are the key trade-offs between simplicity and flexibility for a self-managed cluster? How critical is integrated storage and load balancing from the start, and what are the most common pitfalls in the initial architecture that caused you pain months down the line, especially around networking and upgrades?