[kungfufrog]

There's 2 things on the horizon here for Kubernetes that give me hope. KCL, its own configuration language, and Timoni, which builds off CUE and corrects some of the shortcomings of Helm.

Though these days, OLM and the Quarkus operator SDK give you a completely viable alternative approach to Helm that enables you to express much more complex functionality and dependency relationships over the lifecycle of resources. An example would be doing a DB backup before upgrading to a new release etc. Obviously this power comes at a cost.