We are using k8s as well for a project that we also provide on-prem install too. We decided to use kustomize for now vs doing helm for now. Curious, have someone had experience with both to compare. What are the benefits of using helm?

`helm` is an absolute garbage. I'll reserve judgment about `kustomize` until I have more practical experience, but so far it looks to me that it's going to be another YAML disaster.

The problem with k8s ecosystem is that developers conflated k8s using yaml for a semi-human-readable serialization of k8s resources, as reason to employ YAML to absolutely everything.

What I'd like is to generate serialized yaml files ... you know ... with code. Using some typed programming language, to be able to build any abstractions required for the job, and get some checks, compiler errors, and even ability to have asserts, unit-tests and so on. Instead, I have to dig YAML with a pickaxe in the YAML-mine without any technology to assist me.