OK. Found some sort of problem 😕

const kconfig = fs.readFileSync("../kubeconfig").toString();
const kubernetesProvider = new k8s.Provider("metrics", {
  kubeconfig: kconfig
});

Fails:

error: unable to load Kubernetes client configuration from kubeconfig file: invalid configuration: no configuration has been provide

But

kubectl get pods -n community --kubeconfig=./kubeconfig

works 😞