Actually, yes. We use yamerl parser for parsing YAML in Erlang and Erlang has both strings and atoms; yamerl generally turns unquoted YAML strings into atoms an

Actually, yes. We use yamerl parser for parsing YAML in Erlang and Erlang has both strings and atoms; yamerl generally turns unquoted YAML strings into atoms and double-quoted YAML strings into strings. But nobody else cares about how yamerl parses YAML for Erlang and lots of tool try to re-normalize YAML as they process it; so if we put e.g. config: option: "this_must_be_a_string" into a Helm chart, and then run it through helm, the resulting YAML will be config: option: this_must_be_a_string and when fed to our Erlang application, the option's value will end up being an atom, and it will blow up when we try to e.g. concatenate it with another string. But '"this_must_be_a_string"' resists all such normalization attempts, gets to be passed around as-is, and ends up being parsed as a string with embedded starting and ending quotes but those can be easily stripped away as a global post-pass on a parsed config, before consuming it any further.