I was reading the description trying to figure out what it actually does. I built remote k3s deployment over ssh into a product I worked on, and there really was very little to it. Shell into the machine, run the installer, set the config - and that last part is going to be unique to your situation anyway. It makes perfect sense that your setup got simpler after removing this.

The pronunciation ketchup is somewhat unfortunate as a popular backup operator for k8s, k8up, also claims this.