I feel like Ansible generating YAML with Jinja templates is really a sweet-spot, with idempotency and reusability. I find it pushes me to write plain YAML file

I feel like Ansible generating YAML with Jinja templates is really a sweet-spot, with idempotency and reusability. I find it pushes me to write plain YAML files for variables and defaults (Ansible), while allowing strong templating of generated files (Jinja) and letting the result be readable (YAML). By readable I mean minimum programming bloat (code spread on many lines just to write a for loop) and minimum extra syntax that clutters the screen (brackets and quotes). It also lets me write very little custom code (aside from variables, obviously). If I had to use a more "powerful" YAML-like replacement, it would mix all these into files, written differently by people with different styles, and it would have bloat all over the place. The main issue I have with helm is that values.yml is not templatable by default so you have to generate it if you want reusability. YAML does one thing and does it well, it's readable and bloat-free. Maybe we need more tools like "kubectl explain" to know the syntax though.