Once you add in workload scaling, availability and durability, there is surely a dedicated ops team that want to control every aspect of how it’s deployed, including the security around it. They are not just going to blindly apply a chart without at least having reviewed it in great detail first.

What I found is that when doing such review, you realize 99 of the template variables are not relevant for you and the one place you need to template is missing a value. Just extracting the rendered manifests and modify them by hand from there becomes more maintainable. Like you say, there is a very limited set of common denominators.

For smaller orgs, just running a single container and increasing the Node size takes you a very long way. That doesn’t need helm.