Do you have any examples of deploying to Kubernetes with something you consider real tools? I agree with what you are saying but have found very few real world companies using real languages for this.
At work we use typescript to generate yaml files which are then synced to their respective clusters via Gitops.
It works fairly well. All cluster/namespace differences are encoded into our typescript code base, so we can take advantage of a real programming language to generate cluster specific yaml all sharing a common “base”.