I also don't like Helm for these and more reasons, and thus I often have the wrong personal incentives to point out that the yaml indentation issue can be solve

I also don't like Helm for these and more reasons, and thus I often have the wrong personal incentives to point out that the yaml indentation issue can be solved in a trivial way: yaml 1.2 is (for all practical purposes) a superset of JSON, thus all you have to do when you emit a bit of yaml from a template is to pipe it through the "to json" function and the resulting string is valid YAML yet independent of the indentation of the insertion point.