I've searched and found a general "no" to this question, but I wonder more specifically about the reasoning / why. I have a busy cluster with high churn rate, my current issues stem from IO latency in the etcd space / control plane. Because rke2 only supports colocated etcd & control plane components, this seems like a pretty severe shortcoming. Is there any advise towards addressing this type of issue with rke2?

You can disable all the control-plane components on a server and run it as an etcd-only node. But if your etcd is io-bound that doesn't generally help since the control plane itself generates almost no io. What would help most is to put additional iops behind etcd.

Is there documentation on how to do this, i didnt see anything specifically relating to this on my few read throughs? Aside, our limitations are coming from cpu scheduling on the hypervisor. The API and etcd are both heavy resource consumers, with a fixed physical node size, bigger VMs don't improve performance past a certain point, IO scheduling is the first thing to fall down on shared hardware