We built and deployed a new pipeline based on kustomize and have been gradually moving some helm things over to it. The feedback from app developers is quite go

We built and deployed a new pipeline based on kustomize and have been gradually moving some helm things over to it. The feedback from app developers is quite good, and there's no question that it is much less obfuscating of the underlying resources than helm is (if you follow all the chart conventions, etc.). And then as noted in other replies it is in kubectl as of 1.14... which I guess doesn't mean that much except it feels sort of like canonizing the approach. That said its design is quite opinionated and committed to a declarative model, and there are some things you just can't do without falling back on either generating a patch or performing unstructured edits. A good example is something as simple as tagging an image with a string that isn't known until build time (such as the commit sha). Another is shared configuration. You can't glob object names and apply the same environment patch, for example, to more than one resource. These constraints can be considered features, but they're nonetheless constraints.