kubelet stuck activating

having an issue when upgrading kubelet on the kubernetes 1.26 playground: https://killercoda.com/playgrounds/sc...

kubelet hangs in an activating state.

I checked the cgroup driver and it's set to systemd (https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/prod...)

I checked the kubelet configmap and it's set to systemd cgroup driver as well (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/admi...)

When I edit the node with kubectl edit no controlplane I see that the value of kubeadm.alpha.kubernetes.io/cri-socket is already set to unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock

I disabled the docker daemon with systemctl disable docker.service --now

I uninstalled docker service completely with:
sudo apt-get purge docker-engine

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge docker-engine

rm -rf /var/lib/docker

find docker packages
dpkg -l | grep -i docker

sudo apt-get purge -y docker-compose docker.io

sudo apt-get autoremove -y --purge docker-compose docker.io

installed containerd (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/admi...)

I made sure that cri is not included in the disabled_plugins list within /etc/containerd/config.toml

*SOLUTION:*

Remove the "--container-runtime remote" argument (which still worked for 1.26) after upgrade from file /etc/default/kubelet