> How do you deal with this?

Isn't that the problem that kustomize is designed to solve? Flux even has a first-class declaration for "take this thing, then kustomize it". The `helm template` into git pattern could be extended to "helm template, write kustomize files, then version control both" since it would capture the end state as well as the diffs that were applied on top of the vanilla chart

I think the "maintaining our own version of the helm chart" is only painful if the helm chart itself is moving around a lot, versus they're using helm releases to carry changes to "--set image.tag=$(( tag + 1 ))" type thing