You're right, and one of the reasons I decided to start a community here was because @ernest has done a fantastic job laying out the plans for scale at kbin (both the instance and the platform as a whole) thus far - detail here. Thus far he's the only instance owner I've seen with a real roadmap, and actively applying for grant funding to cover scaling costs. It's good to see - kbin is definitely his baby and he takes great care of it.

Regarding other small kbin instances, you might look at kglitch.social. @kglitch has made some frontend changes that bring it more in line with Mastodon and Lemmy, and I haven't seen an outage yet.