Using literally anything other than helm will make your life 100x better with k8s.

Helm is a great tool, but you absolutely must keep it simple. We use Helm at work, and our charts are 95% hard-coded YAML templates, with an occasional sprinkling of a Helm variable for values which differ between dev/test/prod. It works great and is a ton easier than Kustomize for that purpose. But I would never want to maintain the super complex Helm charts you see in public repos.