This is partially a tangent, but the whole managing of software infrastructure is a strange culture. There would of course be lots of better ways, but it's too bad the infrastructure side of the software industry lives partially in a parallel world and many of the lessons from elsewhere in the industry are not really widespread there (at least yet). Even banks seem intelligent and innovative compared to infrastructure management mainstream practices.

It's very error prone to describe a hierarchy of versioned software packages and configuration with shell scripts and yaml. Or use text files in git as a database. Or use the CI system as a bad substitute for a proper service (in order to do a simple thing, you must first create the world from scratch). And so on. Mainstream industry knows types, programming languages, relational databases, graphs and you name it, but those have not yet penetrated sufficiently into the infrastructure world. The understanding of the value of having types has been paid in sweat and blood when developing software and databases. Even a basic CRUD application with a basic SQL database will run rings around these Frankenstein monsters: in safety, speed, and extendability.

I definitely prefer using kustomize over helm, where the mentioned interpolation takes place.

You can do JSON instead of YAML.

But no one does that because it is significantly uglier. So I guess we don't deserve sanity because we don't want our programs to be ugly?