The part I found to be a little unwieldy at times was helm. It becomes a little unpredictable when you apply updates to the values.yaml file, which ones will apply, and which ones need to be set on start up. Also, some helm installations deploy a massive number of services, and it's confusing which ones are safe to restart when.

But, I've always found core kubernetes to be a delight to work with, especially for stateless jobs.

Helm is annoying. I’m thankful it makes software easier to install but it’s like being thankful for npm.