Also, please fix the "default" helm chart template, it's a nightmare of options and values no beginner understands. Make it basic and simple.

Nowadays i would very much prefer to just use terraform for kubernetes deployments, especially if you use terraform anyway!

Any tool that encourages templating on top of YAML, in a way that prevents the use of tools like yamllint on them, is a bad tool. Ansible learned this lesson much earlier and changed syntax of playbooks so that their YAML passes lint.

Additionally, K8s core developers don't like it and keep inventing things like Kustomize and similar that have better designs.

Helm, and a lot of devops tooling, is fundamentally broken.

The core problem is that it is a templating language and not a fully functional programming language, or at least a DSL.

This leads us to the mess we are in today. Here is a fun experiment: Go open 10 helm charts, and compare the differences between them. You will find they have the same copy-paste bullshit everywhere.

Helm simply does not provide powerful enough tools to develop proper abstractions. This leads to massive sprawl when defining our infrastructure. This leads to the DevOps nightmare we have all found ourselves in.

I have developed complex systems in Pulumi and other CDKs: 99% of the text just GOES AWAY and everything is way more legible.

You are not going to create a robust solution with a weak templating language. You are just going to create more and more sprawl.

Maybe the answer is a CDK that outputs helm charts.

I liked KRO's model a lot but stringly typed text templating at the scale of thousands of services doesn't work, it's not fun when you need to make a change. I kinda like jsonnet plus the google cli i forget the name of right now, and the abstraction the Grafana folks did too but ultimately i decided to roll my own thing and leaned heavily into type safety for this. It's ideal. With any luck i can open source it. There's a few similar ideas floating around now - Scala Yaga is one.