My experience too. I strongly believe there is room for some kind of tool to help with this process, whether it be a library, DSL, or framework. Something light

My experience too. I strongly believe there is room for some kind of tool to help with this process, whether it be a library, DSL, or framework. Something lightweight that places some order on the problem of generating configuration, nothing more. Otherwise writing raw python and dumping to JSON (or using python client libraries for whatever you're targeting, e.g. kubernetes), quickly becomes an unmaintainable mess.