You removed the Ark config files, but didn't add the Velero ones?
Doing the same thing with systemd timers would be very complex for no reason: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers#MAILTO
Oh, and Let's Encrypt of course.
I think now you lost the purpose of it. If you put it on 4 different nodes, then you don't need Ingress at all. The entire point of Ingress is routing traffic to services, no? No need for Ingress if you're just doing DNS round-robin to all nodes of the cluster. But with all the drawbacks of having to have all those nodes be online 100% of the time.
I think I read about it here: https://www.doxsey.net/blog/kubernetes--the-surprisingly-affordable-platform-for-personal-projects
I assume this is a very long-winded way of saying "yes, a load balancer is indeed necessary in front of nginx-ingress"?
If we don't need one for normal Ingress (without SSH), then we only need for Gitea, which leaves us with the same one load balancer that we have without setting up Ingress for it.