Here’s what this means for real-world kubernetes deployments:

- 99% of Kubernetes deployments use dockerd as a runtime

- 99% of dockerd deployments use containerd as a runtime

- containerd can be called directly by kubernetes via cri-containerd

- Therefore most Kubernetes deployments can, and should, be simplified by calling containerd directly.

- This deprecation notice will make this transition happen sooner.

This is the natural consequence of Docker itself splitting out its runtime into containerd.