Feels like I would be taking on a lot of debt and maintainability I may not need

It depends on what you're trying to build to be honest. For simple tasks Orloj can be a little overkill but it really starts shining when you are trying to setup large task flows that need many agents/tools/policies. Working with Terraform/Kubernettes for years gave a lot of the inspiration for the gitops side of things which we think fits naturally with how agent systems work.