> but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender.

Your comment is accurate for the original Swarm project, but a bit misleading regarding Swarm mode (released later on and integrated into docker).

I have worked on the original Swarm project and Swarmkit (on the distributed store/raft backend), and the latter was intended to compete with Kubernetes.

It was certainly an ambitious and borderline delusional strategy (considering the competition), but the goal was to offer a streamlined and integrated experience so that users wouldn't move away from Docker and use Swarm mode instead of Kubernetes (with a simple API, secured by default, just docker to install, no etcd or external key value metadata store required).

You can only go so far with a team of 10 people versus the hundreds scattered across Google/RedHat/IBM/Amazon, etc. There were so many evangelists and tech influencers/speakers rooting for Kubernetes already, reversing that trend was extremely difficult, even after initiating sort of a revolution in how developers deployed their apps with docker. The narrative that cluster orchestration was Google's territory (since they designed Borg that was used at a massive scale) was too entrenched to be challenged.

Swarm failed for many reasons (it was released too soon with a buggy experience and at an incomplete state, lacking a lot of the features k8s had, but also too late in terms of timing with k8s adoption). However, the goal for "Docker Swarm mode" was to compete with Kubernetes.