would be nice, but we would also have to reimplement all of the charts we use, big ask/lift

DevOps has more friction for tooling changes because of the large blast radius

What do you prefer?

Just straight raw manifest files.

How do you have anything dynamic? How do you handle any differences at all between your infrastructure and what the authors built it for.

I get the feeling that most people commenting here have only surface level experience with deploying k8s applications. I don't care for helm myself but it's less bad than a lot of other approaches like hand rolling manifests with tools like envsubst and sed.

Kustomize also seems like hell when a deployment reaches a certain level of complexity.