Dhall or other typed languages like Cue definitely help a lot. It seems to me that the only acceptable amount of YAML you could have in deployment config is for a setup small enough that it doesn't warrant using Kubernetes, so any use case where Kubernetes is a good fit quickly becomes a major pain to maintain.

That said, you wrote:

> drop k8s like its hot [...] We have phased it out everywhere we could.

Could you elaborate on what you've replaced Kubernetes with, and for what kind of deployment?