[solatic]

Generators need to be debugged, not data. It's very easy to test a generator - a few unit tests checking whether, for a given input, the generator produced the expected output, and you're set. Data sometimes needs to be cleaned, but there's no such thing as a bug in data.

Whether the generated declarative output produces the expected behavior on the part of the tool interpreting the declarative output is part of the tool's contract, not the generator or the declarative output. If you need to check the tool's behavior then either a) you wrote the tool or b) you're writing an acceptance test for the tool, which is an entirely different endeavor.

[UserIsUnused]

Things like pipeline definitions and helm charts are generators.

[solatic]

No, Helm uses charts (data) to generate object definitions (in YAML). Helm is the generator.

There's nothing that prevents you from writing a unit test that runs `helm template` directly to check whether a given chart with given values will produce a given set of YAML files.