What was really annoying was the constant moving and changing the yaml that kubernetes wanted. After you update your cluster and things stop working, it's really not about the layers on top, but it's about kubernetes and having to keep up with the new beta versions and also sunsetting other things.
That to me sounds like you're angry at helm and argocd, but don't realize it.
The kubernetes apiserver publishes all the resources it supports, including custom-resource-definitions, including typed specifications that can be used to validate what you're submitting client-side.
If helm weren't a dumb layer of yaml templating, it could tell you locally, like compiling a typed programming language, "this helm chart won't work on your cluster because you have the beta version of this CRD and need the alpha version", or it could even transform things into the correct version.
The kubernetes API provides everything that's needed to statically verify what Groups/Kinds/Versions exist, and tooling like helm is just too dumb to work with it.