So how did people mange kubernetes before gitops? Automating "kubectl apply" in a different way in each company? Also it's useless to this discussion but polli

So how did people mange kubernetes before gitops? Automating "kubectl apply" in a different way in each company? Also it's useless to this discussion but polling was also a standard thing in puppet / chef / saltstack. Main motivation was to make deployments more gradual so in case of untested code only stone subset of servers is affected