[fivre]

JSON patches aren't the most intuitive and kustomize needs some helper tooling to generate them for you (given JSON objects A and B, generate a patch that transforms A into B), but overall the kustomize model makes more sense, and the team behind it seems to be more actively improving developer QoL stuff than Helm is

templates are only good if your templates can remain simple and do not need to expose most of the output fields. my experience developing a chart for wide distribution has been very much that your templates will not remain simple (and will turn into an incomprehensible mess, since you'll need them to handle tasks templates are fundamentally poorly suited for) and that there is always someone, somewhere, that needs some particular resource field exposed in values.yaml. the

> As a result, the number of possibilities for configuration is often unreasonably large and complicated, mimicking the actual resources they want to create, but without any schema validation!

bit from the op is incredibly true. values.yaml grows, over time, to have every field in the objects it generates, just organized differently, without validation, and with extra complicated relationships with other settings

kustomize allowing you to provide a base set of resources that users can apply their own patches to avoids that config surface bloat problem entirely