also going against AKS - so getting lots of apiserver "throttling request" responses - any chance of adding some rate limiting to the kubernetes provider, or do I just hope that this will resolve itself and not ending up blocking my provider at some point? 😉

Pulumi does have retry and backoff handling. It's possible you're seeing these as a result of that logic and that the messages will stop once the cluster is available.

no flags, just a bit odd to see them in the diagnostics if they are of no consequence (which I hope they are)