I've worked 4 years for a client where everything was either plain K8S YAMLs Kustomizations, mostly the latter.
Large clusters, about 80 service teams and many hundreds of apps.
We (the platform team) managed roughly 30-40 services or controllers, including cert-manager, our own CRD for app deployments, ElasticSearch, Victoria Metrics, Grafana and others.
It was (still is, only I'm sadly not there anymore!) a high performing team and organisation with a lot going on.
We reviewed the decision to not use Helm many times and every time it was pretty much unanimous that we had a better solution than the opaque and awkward templating.
Large clusters, about 80 service teams and many hundreds of apps.
We (the platform team) managed roughly 30-40 services or controllers, including cert-manager, our own CRD for app deployments, ElasticSearch, Victoria Metrics, Grafana and others.
It was (still is, only I'm sadly not there anymore!) a high performing team and organisation with a lot going on.
We reviewed the decision to not use Helm many times and every time it was pretty much unanimous that we had a better solution than the opaque and awkward templating.