This is good to see. I haven't had a chance to play around with cdk8s, but I've used the AWS CDK and Helm pretty extensively. Helm was a good tool for its time, but the limitations of template-based reuse are pretty clear, at least to me.

Helm suffers from the common problem that occurs when you try to build reusability out of a template-based system. Eventually you end up surfacing so many configuration parameters to meet different use-cases and needs, that complexity starts becoming unmanageable.

CDK's approach tends to lead to smaller and more understandable IaC, because it targets re-use at the component level and not the application level. I haven't come across a template-based system that does that effectively; usually there's a macro-type system at most.