helm-x VS ketch

Exactly this. No need to wrap your app that only you consume and deploy as a helm chart. If you want to benefit from Helms application management features like rollbacks, you can use helm-x or helmify

TLDR Use cdk8s + helm-x to be able to deploy cdk8s manifests as helm charts, with all the benifits of helm.

We are already very close to that IMHO. The functionality is not yet built in Helm. If you look at CDK8s + Helm X you can already do it for your team. The only limitation is that you can't publish that as a chart.

helm-x - Treat any Kustomization or K8s manifests directory as a Helm chart

Here at Suse we looked at https://github.com/theketchio/ketch and the founder for Acorn did some diligence there. Is it a copy?

An idea may be to look at something like Ketch, and potentially combine it with Pulumi, TF, or others. Here is an example

You have some more “established” tools, such as Ketch but from what I’ve seen, many people are building it in house by using tools such as Helm, Crossplane, or others

Pretty much what Ketch has been doing for a while already, and Ketch is part of a larger app platform

Pretty much what Ketch has been doing for a while now

Another option you have is to use open source projects like Ketch that can make this process more "developer friendly". Here is an example

Because of that, we have created an open-source project called Ketch to make life easier when deploying apps on K8s.

The team is excited about enabling developers to focus on their application code instead of infrastructure. We would love it if you could show your support by starring the project on GitHub and sharing this article with your teammates.

It might be worth having a look at the open source project Ketch

Instead, by combining the application-focused approach from Ketch with the IaC model from Pulumi, developers can have an application-focused layer they can leverage to quickly deploy their applications without getting into the underlying infrastructure details exposed by Kubernetes.