One of the issues is that the open source Helm charts (or whatever) for something like Grafana do not come out-of-the-box with good config. I spent a significant amount of time a little while ago reading blogs to get Grafana to use up to date indexing algorithms, and better settings, etc.

Considering these companies make money when you use their hosted solution, this is not surprising, and it just goes to show TANSTAFL.

I like to use operators for intra-cluster infra, they tend to offer a "sorta-managed" experience. I'll use a Helm chart deployed by ArgoCD to provision the operator, then go from there - mainly because I try to limit Helm usage as much as possible.