Helm is not official or blessed or anything, just another third party tool people install after install k8s.

Yes, you really don't need to use helm if you have terraform. Just use https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/kubernetes... .

If you used helm + terraform before, you'll have no problem understanding the terraform kubernetes provider (as opposed to the helm provider).

It does make it challenging to track operators as upstream usually only provide/document helm installation.

If you write your own tf definition of operator x v1, it can be tricky to upgrade to v2 - as you need to figure out what changes are needed in your tf config to go from v1 to v2.

Helm is sort of like a docker (or maybe docker compose) for k8s, in terms of a helm chart is a prepackaged k8s "application" that you can ship to your cluster. It got very popular very quickly because of the ease of use, and I think that was premature which affects its day-to-day usability.

The way I understand, helm is the npm of k8s.

You can install, update, and remove an app in your k8s cluster using helm.

And you release a new version of your app to a helm repository.

The thing i would add to this is that in most cases, you need to manually provide config values to the install.

This sounds okay in principle, but I far too often end up needing to look through the template files (what helm deploys) to understand what a config option actually does since documentation is hit or miss.

It's a client-side preprocessor essentially. The K8s cluster knows nothing about Helm as it just receives perfectly normal YAMLs generated by Helm on the client.

I really appreciate the k3s default with HelmChart type and operator installed. Makes working with charts simpler in my view

Yes, I use flux which has a similar HelmChart/HelmRelease resource. One of the things that took me a while to "get" with K8s is operators are just clients running on the cluster.