The salient details are chronicled in this Github Issue
But summarizing: tutor v15 and later uses a refactored K8sClients init() that seems to only work when the Ubuntu instance running tutor is inside the VPC where the Kubernetes cluster is located. The newer code introduces an interesting way to call the k8s api from inside a running pod in the cluster, referred to as incluster_config() and apparently something which the new version of tutor depends, for launching k8s jobs.
Has anyone else run into this?