Best I have used is Flux with helmrelease objects and kustomize. Only lacking some UI to get flux events and logs together. I guess that Argocd can do the same with application onjects using charts as source but haven’t tested it yet

But managing both k8s external components (external-dns, external-secrests, CSI, etc etc) and your own apps with kustomizable charts makes so much more sense than having thousand of manifests that I would recommend everyone to try.

If I could be bothered to sit and write down a distilled version of my last decade at work it would be something very similar. Any junior SRE can benefit from this.