[mountainriver]

Controller + CRD is the way to go and seems more in line with how k8s was intended to be used.

The challenge has historically been that controllers are a lot harder to write, but I think that story has improved over the years

[arccy]

operators are great when you control it. less so when it's some third party one that doesn't support that field you need on a resource it creates

and all the customizations just end up being yaml merges from a configmap string or CRD if you're lucky

[mountainriver]

Fair enough, the UX is just so much better that I'd gamble it in most use cases