> If your configuration is megabytes of impossible to understand YAML, and is also not portable to other environments, then what's the point?

If almost all your configuration is about getting Kubernetes set up, and not about your application setup inside Kubernetes, there probably isn't a point. But being able to use roughly the same config inside different Kubernetes is quite good.

But I've never seen portable kubernetes configs (except for vendor software that probably wouldn't be needed outside of kubernetes).

If you just tell kubectl to dump your pod configs, then load them on some other cluster, that definitely won't work.

If you use the management software that generated the pod setup somewhere else, that probably won't work either because the somewhere else is going to be missing the CSI and CNI you targeted. Even if those match, it'll be missing the CRDs. God help you if you want to run two programs on one Kubernetes, and there's a CRD versioning conflict in their two dependency sets.