[buster]

I think we are having different contexts here. I am mostly talking about selfwritten services and how writing, maintaining and deploying helm charts for them is a nightmare.

Regarding dependencies: Using some SaaS Kubernetes (Google GKE) for example, you'll typically use terraform for SQL and other Services anyway (atleast we do use Google CloudSQL and not some selfhosted postgres in k8s).

I find it interesting that cert-manager points to kubectl for new users and not helm: https://cert-manager.io/docs/installation/

But, for sure, there may be reasons to use helm, as you said. I'm sure it is overused, though.