Helm is what you should use as your cluster "package manager" to install all of your favorite off the shelf tools. Kustomize is probably a better choice for sh

Helm is what you should use as your cluster "package manager" to install all of your favorite off the shelf tools. Kustomize is probably a better choice for shipping your internal projects due to the variations you mentioned, but also because the learning curve isn't much steeper than learning about how to work with plain Kubernetes manifests.