We use Pulumi for IAC of non-k8s cloud resources too, so it doesn't introduce anything extra. In reality all but the smallest Kubernetes services will want some

We use Pulumi for IAC of non-k8s cloud resources too, so it doesn't introduce anything extra. In reality all but the smallest Kubernetes services will want something other than hand-written YAML: Helm-style templating, HCL, etc. TypeScript gives us type safety, and composable type safety. E.g. we have a function that encapsulates our best practices for speccing a deployment, and we get type safety for free across that function call boundary. Can't do that with YAML.