The correct syntax in the code to reach the selenium standalone running in the kubernetes cluster was

http://remote-chrome-webdriver.default.svc:80/wd/hub

Also we had to create a Kubernetes service to expose this selenium to other workloads in the cluster

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: remote-chrome-webdriver
  labels:
    app: remote-chrome-webdriver
spec:
  selector:
    app: remote-chrome-webdriver
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 4444
  type: LoadBalancer