Jsonnet wouldn't be as bad as it is if there was just a modicum of debugging aid.
I'm slowly chipping away at that problem by implementing some tooling. For example I recently added "traceback" functionality in https://github.com/kubecfg/kubecfg
Another thing that I noticed is that most people who end up writing template libraries for jsonnet are using too many functions and not leveraging the strengths of jsonnet, namely object extension.
I opensourced a library I'm using internally at $work. It's far from perfect and sorely lacking docs and examples but if you want to give jsonnet another go I'd recommend you try kubecfg + https://github.com/kubecfg/k8s-libsonnet
The problem with Pulumi is that it wants to manage the state of things rather than letting the k8s server handle that. This means it's a hell of a lot slower than the equivalent `kubectl apply`. Not to mention it's own state persistence really sucks if you don't use their hosted solution that supports a patched based state update protocol (which someone really should implement an OSS version of).
I have be working on a new project and I split the IaC stuff into two layers, essentially using Pulumi (w/Kotlin) to spin up the k8s cluster and dependencies for Config Connector (on GCP). From there I'm just generating and applying manifests with fabric8 (more Kotlin).
It's not quite as good as Jsonnet in some cases (because of lazy vs non-lazy mostly and always-supported deep-merge etc) but Kotlin is immensely powerful and has things like the `lazy` helper to help here.
Having the entire repo defined in Kotlin though is very nice. Build system is Gradle w/Kotlin script, frontend is htmx only generated by Kotlin DSL, IaC all Kotlin as described.
We did similar at $CURRENT_JOB with Typescript but Kotlin is miles better IMO.
I will agree that it's not optimal but there is still a big difference between text templating and Jsonnet.
Something Jsonnet-esque but with more typing help, better debugging (especially error messages instead of `blah thunk, thunk thunk` would go a long way.
I'm slowly chipping away at that problem by implementing some tooling. For example I recently added "traceback" functionality in https://github.com/kubecfg/kubecfg
Another thing that I noticed is that most people who end up writing template libraries for jsonnet are using too many functions and not leveraging the strengths of jsonnet, namely object extension.
I opensourced a library I'm using internally at $work. It's far from perfect and sorely lacking docs and examples but if you want to give jsonnet another go I'd recommend you try kubecfg + https://github.com/kubecfg/k8s-libsonnet