Helm is fun for demoing complex things the first time, but in production use, it’s a mixed bag. Lots of great alternatives that feel more ‘clean’ to me.

What are the cleaner alternatives?

Cloud 66 Skycap is a good alternative without most of the issues of Helm

This seems like a full-fat Build and Release management hosted solution (good job by the way, this looks great and I'll try it out).

I was more specifically asking Jeff which similar tools are cleaner, and why? Are there any helm drop-in replacements that anyone would recommend? Or is it really a shift to other ways of deploying, like these hosted solutions, or is everyone building their own k8s operators now...? Or something else?

Fair points and questions. I think most of the past couple of years was spent on making Kubernetes operation friendly. Now everyone has a managed k8s service so there are many solutions coming up to deal with their issues in “Day 2” like deployments or secret management