You are right the NFS client provisioner is not needed. This approach was chosen because the NFS server address only has to be configured once for the provisioner. Each PVC claims a subfolder within the shared NFS share. This might be undesirable for certain scenarios, but it works for us with zero friction.

Creating a PVC is as simple as:

  ---
  kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
  apiVersion: v1
  metadata:
    name: data
  spec:
    accessModes:
      - ReadWriteMany
    resources:
      requests:
        storage: 5Gi

And because of this, it's compatible with pretty much all helm charts that rely on the default StorageClass that works without extra configurations or manual operations like creating shares and figuring out what NFS server to use.