i have looked at the mikrotik hardware, am in the market for 25G and 40G routing. but i find microtik somewhat underpowered and outdated ?

is mikrotik moving away frm hardware? or will we see more beefier specs like 4 or 8 cores, decent ram and high speed wifi mesh like AX11000. so the routers and switches also can run the control planes for docker and kubernetes. and support Cat7 and Cat8 cables.

If you want to run docker and kubernetes you should buy a general purpose server, not a router. Mikrotik is designed for home / office / small ISP networks, not datacenters.

not running it, but as an controlplane for all its networking stuff. containers is pretty much the standard way to start these days over having multiple server racks. would be nice to see more hardware boxes.

of course you now can build it yourself with cards like CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe that can route 100Gbit

Everything is not about speed.