I also think helm is terrible.

Helm's stated goal is to be something of a package manager for apps in k8s, but this is fundamentally unworkable as shown by... Helm. It's hard to describe just how unworkable this idea is.

Let's start with an example, you want to install an app (let's say Jira) and a DB backend of your choice, postgres or mysql.

The first step where this all falls down is, it may or may not support your preferred DB. Sure, Jira does, but does the chart?

Assuming it does support your preferred backend, maybe it depends on the chart for the db you picked. If it does, it's going to install it for you, hopefully with best practices, almost certainly not according to your corporate security policy. This is also a problem if say, you have a db you want to use already, prefer to use an operator for managing your db, or use a db outside k8s.

You got lucky, and it supports your DB just the way you want it. Next question, do you want an HA Jira? Often, this part is done so differently that HA Jira and Single host Jira are straight up different charts.

Do you want your DB to be HA? Unfortunately, the chart Jira chart author picked to depend on is the non-HA one. Guess you're out of luck.

Maybe you want to add redis caching? Nginx frontend/ingress? Want to terminate TLS at the app host and not ingress? How do you integrate it with your cert management system?

We haven't even looked at the config, where you have to do everything in a variables.yaml file which is never documented as well as the actual thing it's configuring on your behalf, and is not always done in a sensible manner.

Hopefully it's clear from this that as a user, helm isn't going to work for you, because just as there's no such thing as the average person, there's no such thing as an average deployment. Even a basic one is filled with one off variations for every user that a public chart needs to support.

As a developer, helm is unworkable because you're templating yaml inside yaml. This isn't too bad if you're just tweaking a few things on an otherwise plain chart, but a public chart, that naively hopes to support all the possible configurations? Your otherwise simple chart is now 5-10x longer from all the templating options. Have fun supporting it and adding the new features you'll inevitably need to add and support.

As a counterpoint to all this, kustomize gets a lot right. I don't mean that kustomize is perfect, or even good, but I've found like k8s itself, it understands that the problem space is complex and to try and hide that complexity leads to a lesser product that is more complex because of leaky abstractions.

Kustomize acts as a glue layer for your manifests, so instead of some giant morass of charts and dependencies none of which work for you, you're expected to find a suitable chart for each piece yourself and compose them with Kustomize.

Going through the same example again as a user:

Your vendor has provided a couple basic manifests for you to consume, maybe even only one, because they're expecting you to supply your own DB. Since they only need to supply the Jira part, instead of having an HA chart and a Single node manifest, They just give you one manifest with a stateful set. Or maybe they give you two. One as a deployment and one as a Stateful set. The stateful set might also have an upgrade policy configured for you.

Since the vendor punted on the DB, you can do whatever you like here. You'll have to supply a config map with your db config to the Jira deployment, but that's okay, it's easy to override the default one in the manifest with kustomize. You are now free to use a cloud managed DB, an operator managed one, or just pull the stock manifest for your preferred DB.

Want to terminate TLS in your app again? Easy enough, Cert Manager will provide the certs for you, and supply them as secrets, ready to consume in your app, you just need to tell it where to look.

So now you have all the parts of your Jira deployment configured just how you like, but they're all separate. Maybe you just edited the stock manifests to get your changes in the way you like. Dang, you've created a problem when the vendor updates the manifest, as now you need to merge in changes every time you update it. That seems like a huge hassle. What if you could just keep your changes in a patch and apply that to a stock manifest? Then it's easy to diff upgrades of the stock manifest and see what changed, and it's easy to see what you care about in your patch.

All of this seems like it's getting kind of unwieldy, maybe we can make it easier. We'll have a single kustomization.yaml, and it'll be really structured. In it, you can list all the paths to folders of manifests, or individual files, or git repos/branches/subpaths. We'll also specify a set of patches that look like partial manifests to apply to these base manifests to make it clear what is the base and what goes on top. Then finally, for common things like image versions and namespaces, we'll expose them directly so you don't need to patch everything. We can do that because we're using standard manifests that can be parsed and modified.

That is kustomize, and as awkward as it is, it's just trying to make it clear what you're applying, and what your one customization from stock is in a maintainable way. It does a better job of 'package management' by not managing packages. This is pretty similar to how Linux package managers work. If you install wordpress on your server, it's going to install php, but it might not install apache or nginx, as everyone wants something different. It's definitely not going to install a DB for you. You as the admin have to decide what you want and tell each part about the other.