> but there's some amount of extra stuff deployed (ingress controller, for example) that is documented in a text file

Out of curiosity, why just the "readmeware" for those components? I can't think of a single thing that requires clickops in a modern k8s setup, so much so that in the beginning we used to bring up the full stack from nothing based on a single CFN template - roles, load balancer, auto-scaling group, control plane, csi driver (this was back when EKS was a raging tire fire), and then lay the actual business apps on it. The whole process took about 8 minutes from go

If nothing else, one will want to be cautious about readmeware components in disaster recovery situations. If no one has run those steps in 6 months, and then there's some kind of "all hands on deck," the stress will likely make that institutional knowledge leak out of their ears