I've recently been dipping my toes into k8s / kustomize / helm, and I recently had a situation where having a base deployment yml template that I wanted to reuse across various deployments. I had a look at Helm and I was frankly shocked how bad the templating was with Go templates, it was close to unreadable and felt very brittle!
How so? I find it much the same to other templating engines like Jinja, though I'm definitely not a fan of the syntax. But that hardly matters anymore with LLMs.
I did that too, and ended up just skipping helm and using envsubst to interpolate the values I need at runtime from env vars. Nearly everyone preferred that approach. YMMV of course.
Yeah, that's fair. I don't think it's as bad if you make your own charts and can more liberally hardcode things. Community charts tend to have an insane amount of "knobs" so you can basically change everything being templated.
I don't know if I'd necessarily call it brittle, though. You can use `helm template` and various linters to validate the generated yaml is correct (and use something like pre-commit to autorun)