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)