I don’t mean for this to sound condescending or dismissive, BUT if you don’t think Helm is primarily a package manager you haven’t worked with infrastructure deployed in k8s much.
I see this primarily from a business/ops perspective and i do not install helm charts manually through the cli besides for testing.
We provide kubeapps as the packagemanager / interface for providing helm charts and cirumventing package manager features of helm.
For smaller use, we use ArgoCD for IaC and the helm charts are only there for having a package to reference. Again no usage of helm as package manager
Invariably they all involved using helm as a package manager to deploy off the shelf infrastructure with minor adjustments. I still don’t see your point, we can just agree to disagree.
For me the 'package manager' aspects are more than the templating and having a zip file. For me it is more what apt etc. do
So using helm and its remote repositories, using the helm cli etc.
But we use kubeapps or ArgoCD to install the helm packages and download all helm charts before we deploy them (due to security requirements).
We leverage 100% IaC. Therefore we bootstrap ArgoCD and than install everything through ArgoCD. Only helm charts for our customers/collegues are installed through kubeapps.
I guess what I’m saying is: in my experience across many organizations, helm is indeed treated more like a package manager (like I described above). Your workplace seems to be in the minority.
Hope that made sense :)