I wonder why people don't use fromYaml + toJson to avoid stupid errors with indent.

Yaml is for all intents and purposes a superset of JSON so if you render your subtree as JSON you can stick it in a Yaml file and you don't need to care with indentation.

"in a language that uses whitespace for logic"

This argument kind of died when python became one of the most popular programming languages used.

But my infrastructure is code! Can't you see how it's all in git?

Honestly, Helm kinda sucks (for all the reasons you mentioned).

But Kustomize is very nice. Although, their docs could be a bit better.

It’s not that bad if you need to deploy at least 3 things and for most cases it beats the alternatives. You can get away with a bootstrapped deployment yaml and a couple of services for most scenarios. What should you use instead? Vendor locked app platforms? Roll out your own deploy bash scripts?

Sure the full extend of Kubernetes is complicated and managing it might be a pain, but if you don’t go bonkers is not that hard to use it as a developer.

I don’t like helm itself. But I was referring to the deployment part. I like Kustomize more.