I just give developers access to k8s and teach them about it. That's really just my admission that the Kubernetes API isn't perfect, but it's better than many alternatives. If I were to build something to hide k8s from developers, eventually I'd have to add so many extra options that I'd probably end up re-inventing the Kubernetes API anyway.

That may just be unique to my job. Maybe another company could force all apps into nice boxes that prevents their bespoke platform API from leaking.

Helm charts are pretty standard, git/kube-native, and lead much more nicely into the more sophisticated operator/controller model.

One part I haven't quite put a handle on is where/when to use CRDs in either helm or OLM. The community still seems split on how to use CRDs.