One approach if "dang it, someone/I needed to use kubectl during the outage, how do we get gitops/poor-mans-gitops back in place to match reality" is, either agentically-looping or artisanally-looping, to try simple gitops configurations (or diffs to current gitops configurations) until a dry-run diff with your live configuration results in no changes.

For instance, with Helm, I've had success using Helmfile's diffs (which in turn use https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff) to do this.

There's more of a spectrum between these than you think, in a way that can be agile for small teams without dedicated investment in gitops. Even with the messes that can occur, I'd take it over the Heroku CLI any day.