I went into the rabbithole of terraform/HCL and came up with Terragrunt to do dynamic code generation. Combining it together with generous use of `make` keeps me sane, but it's not a long term solution.

Even now, there are things within the system where the boundaries should be separate, but they aren't.

We literally got exhausted and burned out writing our automation, and decided to leave it as it is and then slowly build it up over the next few months. :/

PS: You're 100% right re K8s/YAML. It feels like everything in the Kubernetes world is optimized for writing the code just once. Which, of course, is easy if you already know how all the various bits fit together (true in any system).

But Reading/Debugging kubernetes world is a dreadful experience.

Edit: typo