That’s disingenuous. Most “ops” folks I work with despise templating files but it’s the easiest way to parameterize things, especially when providing ways for “devs” to do “ops”.

Yes, we may not have a cleaner way of deploying k8s Deployment configs to different clusters but the desire to templatize YAML is easy for everyone to understand. The decision to abstract or templatize is one rooted in time and cost, not ability to understand data structures.

personally I’d prefer a templatized yaml file over an over-engineered, snowflake DSL created by a “real programmer” and not an ops person.

Ok, those aren't the only two choices though.