I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.
So do you find Terraform and Vault good or bad? (sorry, not a native English speaker and I had problems to transcript the sentence)
Secrets whatever your cloud provider has (Google secrets manager etc).
Crossplane is excellent but you need to understand CRDs and kubectl at what I'd consider n intermediate level to really grok it whereas Terraform's CLI is almost fool-proof.
Relying on cloud key vaults is expensive and locks you in. Vault and Consul can run anywhere, even in your toaster. They also support those same KMS. Also, dead easy TUI and GUI with Vault Enterprise
What, in this era, replaces provisioning cloudy stuff that doesn't require heaps of YAML or a bootstrap Kubernetes cluster for operators to run within?