kubernetes-operator VS terraform-provider-jenkins

Recently though, I've seen some awesome packaging of jenkins into a stateless beast that is DRY AF and configurable to the N-th degree. Do your engineering squads argue about which plugins to install, syntax to use or even methods of authenticating into the jenkins instance? Fine give them their own instance... all managed via jenkins-operator in your k8s cluster (as an example).

Possible options considered; Run Jenkins on a master and worker build server on EC2 Run Jenkinsci on Kubernetes with https://github.com/jenkinsci/kubernetes-operator

You mean this operator? https://github.com/jenkinsci/kubernetes-operator

Personally I manage and create my jobs manually in jenkins, but terraform does have a Jenkins provider https://github.com/taiidani/terraform-provider-jenkins to allow you to create your jobs via IAC (Infrastructure as Code) if you want to be 100% IAC. This has been a very successful solution for out team. I must give a disclaimer though, while we have jobs to build & deploy all of our apps from src, we generally rely on CircleCi for it. We keep the jenkins build jobs up to date and only use them when CircleCi is down (Which has been much less the last year). In addition to that we (the devops team) use jenkins to run all of our repetitive tasks like a fancy cron service. Things such as reset dev databases, backup or github repo to a second location, run password rotations, recycle services etc.