My annoyance with helm is that it's possible for a helm install to fail, with no top level install status, yet have failed chart resources where you need to go digging around and manually delete before another install can be applied. I mean helm has one key job..

I've switched to kustomize for my homelab. Its built into kubectl (no extra tool needed) and its not really templating.

It doesn't fully replace helm for 3rd party tools or packaging but its a solid alternative for less complicated setups.

Funny then that kustomize apparently is being removed, according to another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41093797

You don't need helm at all. I've used k8s at a few places, big and small, and we just used kustomize or simple scripts to generate the actualized configs.