I'm convinced that the only reason Helm saves you time with 3rd party services is because 3rd party services only provide Helm chart or don't provide means of deployment to k8s at all.

I've been using kustomize to deploy some things with ArgoCD and it's so much easier. Now, I'm trying to never use helm for 3rd party.

However, for your internal things, Helm is hard to replace. It's easy to start a chart that is capable of deploying most of your internal services, but maintaining it is a nightmare.

Actually, using helm, as in `helm` the binary, directly sounds bonkers to me and I wouldn't wish this upon anyone.