I've come to the conclusion that helm/templating is awful. Every helm chart I've ever seen suffers from the kitchen sink problem. Dependencies don't really address the problem either, because that's not really resolving a whole lot in the end.
What I've found so far is that Kustomize strikes a solid balance between an off the shelf working config provided from official sources, and making changes myself to suit my environment. Instead of the developer maintaining a kitchen sink approach, they can have something (or a set of somethings) that are straight forward, and I can maintain a set of tweaks that work for me. Unfortunately Kustomize's documentation is not that great, and it is incredibly awkward to work with.
I'm hoping that solid operators come out for most applications instead of helm charts. I'm not 100% sure that they're going to be substantially better than helm, but I'm hoping between operators and kustomize I can link applications together in a way that I get properly maintained applications for minimal effort (ala AWS), without having to maintain a large code base linking all the bits together.
I do think I need to look into pulumi as it might be in the direction I want to go, but I remain skeptical.
Terraform has some good ideas, but is too rigid for kubernetes, and I feel like I'm giving up the flexibility of kubectl. I like the idea of having a state and resolving differences between desired and actual state, but not enough to rewrite everything in HCL.