Stubby and Chubby are not related to Borg's scalability.
The reason Kubernetes scalability was originally not so great was because it simply wasn't prioritized. We were more concerned with building a feature set that would drive adoption (and making sure the system was stable). Only once Kubernetes began to have serious users, did we start worrying about scalability. There have been a number of blog posts on the Kubernetes blog over the years about what we did to improve scalability, and how we measure it.
I'd encourage you to join the Kubernetes scalability SIG (https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-scal...) to learn more about this topic. The SIG is always interested in understanding people's scalability requirements, and improving Kubernetes scalability beyond the current 5000 node "limit." (I put that in quotes because there's no performance cliff, it's just the maximum number of nodes you can run today if you want Kubernetes to meet the Kubernetes performance SLOs given the workload in the scalability tests.)
The reason Kubernetes scalability was originally not so great was because it simply wasn't prioritized. We were more concerned with building a feature set that would drive adoption (and making sure the system was stable). Only once Kubernetes began to have serious users, did we start worrying about scalability. There have been a number of blog posts on the Kubernetes blog over the years about what we did to improve scalability, and how we measure it.
I'd encourage you to join the Kubernetes scalability SIG (https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-scal...) to learn more about this topic. The SIG is always interested in understanding people's scalability requirements, and improving Kubernetes scalability beyond the current 5000 node "limit." (I put that in quotes because there's no performance cliff, it's just the maximum number of nodes you can run today if you want Kubernetes to meet the Kubernetes performance SLOs given the workload in the scalability tests.)
[Disclaimer: I work on Kubernetes/GKE at Google.]