I know with RKE2 sometimes you can query some items with crictl (I think it's the static pods only). Does K3D run anything with crio such that it could be queried with crictl too?

everything running in containerd is visible with crictl. so, all pods.

Can I get to crictl from the host of k3d, though? When I try pointing to the host's /run/containerd/containerd.sock it says no dice and there isn't a /run/k3s/containerd/containerd.sock on the host (and it's a tmpfs inside the container so I can't just inspect & find the volume). Also with ctr I don't see the k8s.io namespace (just a moby namespace). I guess I'd have to attach to the running docker container for the k3s server to use crictl there?

each individual k3s node running inside k3d has its own separate containerd socket that you would have to get at

Yeah, that's what I figured and I'm not seeing a way to do so. I think this would've been solvable if I were using K3S installed locally or RKE2 instead of K3D.