I admit that I use some Helm stuff in my home environment, but for production I'm genuinely worried about the need to support whatever they've thrown into it.

I admit that I use some Helm stuff in my home environment, but for production I'm genuinely worried about the need to support whatever they've thrown into it. At minimum I'm going to have to study the chart and understand exactly what they propose to open-palm slam into my cluster, and for many/most applications at that point it might genuinely be worth just writing a manifest myself. Not always. Some applications are genuinely complex and need to be! But often, this has been the case for me. For all my stuff, though, I use kustomize and I'm pretty happy with it; it's too stupid for me to be clever, and this is good. Service meshes are a different kettle of fish. hey add exciting new points of failure where they need not exist, and while there are definitely use cases for them, I'd default to avoiding them until somebody proves the need for one.