You're right about these things in my view. There's a lot you can do in a helm chart that you can't do with kustomize and patches. The helm template functions are powerful in their own right; you have conditionals, loops over ranges, you can define your own helpers, and then you have the whole sprig library at your fingertips.
You can't do any of those things with kustomize. And that's really the (admittedly very opinionated) point. I think helm is perfect for the role the project assumed for itself, as a kubernetes package manager. It works well in that role. If you follow the conventions (as you must if you contribute to stable) then your thing has full config coverage with sensible defaults, you can install it multiple times and everything is namespaced.
Like any package manager it's somewhat difficult to write good packages that have all these attributes. And I think you have to admit that a well-written helm chart that covers all the bases is a lot less readable (albeit much more powerful, stipulated) than a simple yaml description of the object you want. It really does constitute a separate API between the developer and the system.
For our own deployable services we don't need all those package manager-like attributes. What we need is for the on-disk representation of our resources to be readable, and we want to be able to make simple changes to single files and not chase value substitution around through layers of indirection. We'll probably continue using helm for stable infrastructure things, but for our own services that are under continuous development and deployment it's come to feel like a mismatch.
