I was curious if it is possible to move completely off hostpaths and use local volumes (persistent volumes) instead. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to include volumeClaimTemplates into a daemonset.

Statefulsets provide volumeClaimTemplates, but they require the replicas to be manually defined, as opposed to auto scaling to as many nodes as can be found.

Is there a way to automatically scale to all nodes, and also create a pvc per replica?

Related question where they decided to use statefulsets and give up autoscaling: Handling PersistentVolumeClaim in DaemonSet