Every time I try to get into Kustomize, I feel it just has a documentation problem. It's written in Ph.D.ese without suitable examples

But, if it helps, my mental model of Kustomize is "it's a sequence of JSON Patch [1] operations"[2] which makes it absolutely stellar for mutating someone else's helm chart[3] (or yaml) since you can target anything for updating to your needs

My secondary complaint is that even JetBrains don't have good support for it, which makes working with them extra hard mode

1: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6902.html

2: it's a very "functional programming language" mental model https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/kust...

3: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/references/kustomize/buil...