RE 1. Just to be precise (as I thought this until recently):
* liveness check will cause pod restarts.
* Readiness check causes the pod to be removed from the round-robin of new traffic requests so it has time to recover/finish processing what it's working on.
You are correct, readiness removes it from any service objects it would be an endpoint to.
My point was more 'the pod doesn't go away'. I've seen some people do stuff with the HPA that could cause it to scale down to minimum replicas if its in a broken state, depending on what stats you are using to scale, but that's more of a 'kubernetes doing what you told it to do' problem.
* liveness check will cause pod restarts.
* Readiness check causes the pod to be removed from the round-robin of new traffic requests so it has time to recover/finish processing what it's working on.