kustomize is the less yolo version of helm: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/guides/introduction/kusto...

It takes some "waaaaa?!" to change the mental model away from text generation and substitution, and I'll be straight that their docs could really use a LOT more CONCRETE examples, but in the end it does as advertised using only kubectl

Then, to address the stateful bit of helm (e.g. helm ls) if one is already kustomize friendly then flux is good about using CRDs to track what things have been deployed: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2#readme (Apache 2)