Of course, but HCL imo is a much better alternative when compared to how yaml is used in k8s. With nomad resulting HCL code even in unrendered state is a much more readable when compared to most k8s manifests. With k8s yaml at some point becomes cumbersome and clunky to use. There might be some practices regarding writing manifests, that i am unaware of that alleviate these issues, but atm i would prefer working with HCL over yaml. And regarding consul. K8s and consul use go templating, which in general feels ok.

I agree. I'm curious to hear your take on what are the main pain points with a) yaml b) the way k8s uses yaml