Why do you want to stop using helm charts? Genuine question, as I'm new to Kubernetes and helm.
Golang string templating in a whitespace sensitive config language suuuuucks.
I might use Helm charts for initial deploys of operators, but that's about it.
Kustomize is, IMO, a better approach if you need to dynamically modify the YAML of your resources and tools like ArgoCD support it.
Consuming one that is well written isn't too much pain, IME. But writing or modifying one can be really annoying. Aiui the values.yaml has no type schema, just vibes. The whole thing is powered off using text templating with yaml (a whitespace sensitive language), which is error prone and often hard to read. That's basically the main issues in a nutshell, it may not sound like much, but helm doesn't exactly do a whole lot and it does that limited set of stuff poorly.
I will leave it to others: https://noyaml.com
Write a few Helm charts and you'll understand why people want to stop using it. `nindent` will become a curse word in your vocabulary. It's a fine tool at the user level, but the DX is an atrocity.