I think custom code is to be expected, and making it maintainable is what's important.

> everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Helm et al made it simpler than it was, IMO.

Everyone hand rolling code does not seem like an improvement over tools like helm even if it’s yaml

No, obviously not, and that's not what I've suggested.

Helm is another can of hot garbage. Impossible to vendor without hitting name collisions, can configure only what’s templated.

Jsonnet is the way to go with generated helm manifests transformed later. Kustomize with its post-renderer hooks is another can of even hotter garbage.

> Impossible to vendor without hitting name collisions

What problem exactly are you facing? I can change the name of the chart itself in chart.yaml and if the name of the resources collide I change them with nameOverride/fullnameOverride in the values. All charts have these because they are autogenerated by `helm create`.

I vendor all charts and never had this problem.

You just made a copy of a chart. You modified your chart. What I’m missing is helm having some notion of an org in the chart name, like docker does: repo/name:tag, helm only has name and version. Hence you modify your chart.yaml and it should be preferable without having to modify anything.

This is really problematic when a chart pulls dependencies in.