I actually used to sed configurations, now I use yq[0] whenever I need to programatically edit YAML/JSON. It has much less side effects.

But for Kubernetes manifests specifically, the right tool for the job is Kustomize[1] (which in that case does what Helm does for you, keeping dynamic variables separate). It ships with kubectl and I'm a big believer in using default tools when possible.

> Like you're installing new version, do you go over manifests and edit those by hand over and over every update?

I check the patch notes, diff the configuration files to see if anything new popped up, do the required changes if necessary, jump the version number and deploy.

It sounds laborious but it's really not that much work most of the time, and more importantly it forces you to have a good sense for what and how everything works. Plus it allows you to have a completely transparent, readable environment. Both are important for keeping things running in a production environment. Otherwise you might find yourself debugging incomprehensible systems you've never paid attention to in the middle of the night with 2 hours left before traffic starts coming in.

[0]: https://github.com/mikefarah/yq

[1]: https://kustomize.io

Well, that makes sense but sounds like I would spend much more time than necessary for many packages. If that would be my full-time job, I guess it would work, but I just need to install something and move on to other things. Some packages install thousands of lines of yaml. I guess I would need more than one day to grok it. Installing it with helm is easy and it usually works.

Something simple like GitLab probably would be impossible to understand for a simple person.

Yeah, I might be thinking of it as simpler than it really is just out of habit. Though it has to be said than most Kubernetes resources are pretty pedestrian, with habit you know where to look for the meaningful bits (much like any other form of source code).