What Kubernetes control plane component exposes the programmatic interface used to create, manage and interact with the Kubernetes objects?

The kube-controller-manager runs various controllers that watch the API server for changes and ensure the desired state, but it is not the API endpoint itself.

kube-proxy is responsible for network proxying for Services on each node, not for exposing the core Kubernetes API.

The kube-apiserver acts as the front end of the Kubernetes control plane, exposing the RESTful API that all other components and external users interact with to manage the cluster's state and resources.

etcd is the backend key-value store where all cluster data is persistently stored, but the kube-apiserver is the interface for accessing and modifying this data.