We switched to jkcfg (<a href="https://jkcfg.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://jkcfg.github.io</a>) for many of these same reasons and are very happy. Text templating on structured data is wrong for many reasons, and kustomize is quite inflexible. "Eww Javascript" but everybody knows it.<p>jkcfg reduced the amount of configuration code/data in our system by an order of magnitude or so.
Isopod is notable for allowing the fetching of remote data that can then be used to configure the kubernetes objects. Terraform and pulumi are the only other ones that allow this. Bad about isopod is that the tool does not appear to automatically delete resources in the cluster after they are deleted from the code, and instead, a delete function must be called manually. That is a conceptual weakness compared to terraform and pulumi, and also a weakness compared to `kubectl apply --prune`.
I love this:<p>A framework to make configs for > A framework that handles devops for > A framework that handles containers (docker) for > A framework of an app