helm-x VS local-path-provisioner

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

Deploy local-path-provisioner storage class but it does not support readwritemany so for high availability of your Kubernetes cluster better to use longhorn

I use this one. I'm waiting for the day it's combined with syncthing to sync across all nodes. https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner

So I have this single node k3s cluster. k3s uses local-path (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner) as default SC that allows one to create dynamic volumes using nodes local storage.

Just create 1 single partition and format it with whatevery filesystem you like. And then use ranchers local-path-provisioner which will create a folder per PV (k3s has this integrated by default).

Tinkering locally with local path provisioner (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner), I find that I can delete and re-create the pod, and the data persists on disk. However, if I delete the PVC, when I recreate the PVC, a new directory on disk is created.

It is better to use https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner (or similar) for this case which will do PVC on local directories because manually linking PV<>PVC will not work.

Since you only have one physical node anyway, I would just make the cluster a single-node cluster (1 VM) and use local storage on that VM. I’m biased though because this is what I do (I run K3s and use local path provisioner).

Rancher's Local Path Provisioner - From reading, seems to just use HostPath or Local PVs under the hood, but adds dynamic provisoning

With any of those tools, you'd implement a network storage on top of a network storage. I would go with mouting few volumes per node +local storage like (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner).