I've personally boiled down the Helm vs. Kubernetes to the following:
Does your Kubernetes configuration need to be installed by a stranger? Use Helm.
Does your Kubernetes configuration need to be installed by you and your organization alone? Use Kustomize.
It makes sense for Grafana to provide a Helm chart for Grafana Alloy that the employees of Random Corp can install on their servers. It doesn't make sense for my employer to make a Helm chart out of our SaaS application just so that we can have different prod/staging settings.
I think it is because most engineers learn to use Kubernetes by spinning up a cluster and then deploying a couple of helm charts. It makes it feel like that’s the natural way without understanding the pain and complexity of having to create and maintain those charts.
Then there are centralised ‘platform’ teams which use helm to try and enforce their own templating onto everything even small simple micro services. Functionally it works and can scale, so the centralised team can justify their existence but as a pattern it costs everyone a little bit of sanity.
Does your Kubernetes configuration need to be installed by a stranger? Use Helm.
Does your Kubernetes configuration need to be installed by you and your organization alone? Use Kustomize.
It makes sense for Grafana to provide a Helm chart for Grafana Alloy that the employees of Random Corp can install on their servers. It doesn't make sense for my employer to make a Helm chart out of our SaaS application just so that we can have different prod/staging settings.