What about something like https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes ?
For example, in our case we do `default_deployment.libsonnet` to which we add arbitrary overrides like `default_deployment + dev` or `default_dep + us_central1_overrides` depending on the cluster. And in these case we don't need to pre-specify what can be overriden in the `default_deployment` which makes it really powerful (also can come bite you in the arse though).
You might have to overload it somehow to make it work the way you're describing though.
But honestly, if you're going for the latter, might as well just use Kustomize and accept the chaos.