So many people complaining about Helm but I'll share my 2 experiences. At my last 2 companies we shipped Helm charts for administrators to easily deploy our stuff.
It worked fine and was simple enough which is what the goal was. But then people came along wanting all sorts of customisations to make the chart configurable to work in their environments. The charts ended up getting pretty unwieldy.
Helm is a product that serves users who like customization to the nth-degree. But everyone else hates it.
Personally, I would prefer it if the 'power users' just got used to forking and maintaining their own charts with all the tweaks they want. The reason they don't do that of course is that it's harder to keep up with updates - maybe that's the problem that needs solving.
I recently learned about Helmfile's support for deep declarative patching of rendered charts, without requiring full forks with value-template-wiring. It's been a gamechanger!
In your context, it might help certain clients. It does require that the upstream commit to not changing its architecture, but if the upstream is primarily bumping versions and adding backwards-compatible features, and if you document all the patches you're recommending in the wild, it might be an effective tool.
It worked fine and was simple enough which is what the goal was. But then people came along wanting all sorts of customisations to make the chart configurable to work in their environments. The charts ended up getting pretty unwieldy.
Helm is a product that serves users who like customization to the nth-degree. But everyone else hates it.
Personally, I would prefer it if the 'power users' just got used to forking and maintaining their own charts with all the tweaks they want. The reason they don't do that of course is that it's harder to keep up with updates - maybe that's the problem that needs solving.