My conclusion is that using Ansible with Kubernetes is the WRONG way to go about it.
So now instead of a directory of yaml or helm charts we have a bunch of ansible uselessly wrapping the yaml for application.
The problem is when you're in a situation where "over here we need YAML document A, and over there we need YAML document B." You either shove a templating system in front of your YAML and fight with that or throw in the towel just use a programming language where constructs in your YAML map to objects.
I think we need to burn this whole thing down and rethink it at this point. A huge amount of the total operational cost of our business is working around weird YAML problems and helm charts.
Had one a while back where quoted strings containing padded numbers in were used for something. "01" fine ... "05" fine, "06" fine, "07" fine, "08" kaboom. 01-07 were treated as strings and 08 was suddenly being treated as octal, which it's not and exploded.
If you feel really strongly about getting type safety then there is Pulumi + Typescript though I really hate how it tries to be a "better" kubectl apply and fails miserably.
Definitely room for someone to make something better than Helm but I think you should give Jsonnet a shot if you haven't already.