I worked at a company where their k8s setup was implemented by someone who did not grok k8s. It was basically a tangle of bash scripts that imperatively set up

I worked at a company where their k8s setup was implemented by someone who did not grok k8s. It was basically a tangle of bash scripts that imperatively set up the infrastructure, including many loops of polling to wait for things to be ready, and direct search-and-replace of string tokens in the resource definitions. The incredible thing was that it mostly worked. The downside was that it was quite brittle, so you had to make changes with great care. It could easily get stuck in an loop, or hit a timeout - often both. This would leave the cluster in a bad state. Then one would have to run a clean-up procedure before retrying. All of this was slow beyond belief.