[honkycat]

Helm sucks.

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.

[cryptonector]

Ok, thought experiment: why not use the k8s JSON interfaces and use jq to generate/template your deployments/services/statefulsets/argo images/etc.?

You say you want a functional DSL? Well, jq is a functional DSL!