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.)