One key distinction is that this is not yet another templating DSL like Jinja, or Go templates that present an anti-pattern for non-trivial deployments. As an example, take a look at the Grafana Helm chart:

https://github.com/bitnami/charts/blob/master/bitnami/grafan...

It's more curly brackets than YAML :)

Instead, kpt's key design philosophy is to keep configuration as data. This makes it easier to develop tooling that operate on configs.