There are a few solutions that try to abstract away the innerworkings of k8s, like Garden and Tilt. They enable you to use a Compose-like syntax for deployment,

There are a few solutions that try to abstract away the innerworkings of k8s, like Garden and Tilt. They enable you to use a Compose-like syntax for deployment, which covers the 80% use case of "I just wanna deploy an app, bro" The issue is that escaping the complexity of Kubernetes is challenging because of that 20%. You want to use Vault for pulling secrets in dynamically and customize how your service mesh routes traffic to your app? Unless you're using something like OpenShift that gives you one way to do it, you're gonna mess with some YAML.