I’ve never used Helm charts. I learned K8S in a shop in which kustomize is the standard and helm is a permitted exception to the standard, but I just never felt any reason to learn helm. Am I missing out?
Sometimes the limitations of kustomize annoy me, but we find ways to live with them
Would you like to count the number of spaces that various items in your manifests are indented and then pass that as an argument to a structure-unaware text file templating engine? Would you like to discover your inevitable yaml file templating errors after submitting those manifests to the cluster? Then yes, you are really missing out!
A couple of years ago I was using https://kapitan.dev/ which I found really good at the time when using jsonnet files to generate the configs. I haven't used it for some time though.
I never understood why people didn’t serialize from JSON if they run a transformation step on the YAML anyway. Read JSON, alter in your favorite language, dump YAML as the last step, deploy. Instant prevention of a lot of sadness.