Personally, I don't like Helm. I think for the vast majority of usecases where all you need is some simple templating/substitution, it just introduces way more complexity and abstraction than it is worth.
I've been really happy with just using `envsubst` and environment variables to generate a manifest at deploy time. It's easy with most CI systems to "archive" the manifest, and it can then be easily read by a human or downloaded/applied manually for debugging with. Deploys are also just `cat k8s/${ENV}/deploy.yaml | envsubt > output.yaml && kubectl apply -f output.yaml`
I've also experimented with using terraform. It's actually been a good enough experience that I may go fully with terraform on a new project and see how it goes.
You might like kubernetes kustomize if you don't care for helm (IMO, just embrace helm, you can keep your charts very simple and it's straight forward). Kustomize takes a little getting used to, but it's a nice abstraction and widely used.
I cannot recommend terraform. I use it daily, and daily I wish I did not. I think Pulumi is the future. Not as battle tested, but terraform is a mountain of bugs anyway, so it can't possibly be worse.
Just one example where terraform sucks: You cannot both deploy a kubernetes cluster (say an EKS/AKS cluster) and then use kubernetes_manifest provider in a single workspace. You must do this across two separate terraform runs.
I've been really happy with just using `envsubst` and environment variables to generate a manifest at deploy time. It's easy with most CI systems to "archive" the manifest, and it can then be easily read by a human or downloaded/applied manually for debugging with. Deploys are also just `cat k8s/${ENV}/deploy.yaml | envsubt > output.yaml && kubectl apply -f output.yaml`
I've also experimented with using terraform. It's actually been a good enough experience that I may go fully with terraform on a new project and see how it goes.