I do thank the advent of LLM's for making the task of tracing through 3 layers of YAML rendering indirection to find an actual bug in layers of insanity. They are surprisingly good at it. A purist might look at the system and be taken aback in horror, but pragmatically the crazy templating things that used to be pretty major in terms of maintainability have become a lot less problematic.

I don't even mind text interpolation in helm that much. Yes, it's horrific, but it really doesn't become problematic until you are having an external system render the text being sent to helm that might be processed again after the fact with Kustomize. Your text might hit literally 3-4 different YAML rendering pipelines before it finally hits your cluster. Insanity

Hashicorp had a similar idea to this configuration language you are mentioning. They named it HCL. We do know how that turned out, but maybe that was more questionable design rather than problems endemic to the approach.

Even if you're all in on AI, it's still not a great situation. Do you want your agent to burn 10000 tokens fixing indentation bugs every time it touches a helm chart?

What takes effort for humans, takes effort for AI too.

And yeah, HCL was a horrible design. Anything else would have been better, Cue, jsonnet, dhall, pkl, etc. (I'm not sure which of those existed when HCL was created.)