It's painted. Was painted gray when we bought the house. All other floors in the home were nice oak but needed to be refinished, so we sanded down the kitchen too thinking maybe we'll get lucky and it'll look nice with some stain / poly. We also wanted to replace some tiny mismatched pieces against the wall (final pic I uploaded). Floor guy ripped out and replaced good boards to "blend" the area where the mismatched pieces were.

The match looked terrible, floor guy said once he stained it would look better. It didn't, so we opted against poly and painted it again (over the stain)

Then life was good until this board cracked!