The ironic thing is that, IIRC, k8s manifests were supposed to be machine-generated from the k8s's inception, you weren't supposed to write them by hand... of course, people wrote them by hand anyway, until it became unbearable ― at which point they've started templating them because that's how the things always seem to progress: manually-written text is almost never replaced by machine-generated config-serialized-to-text, it's replaced by templated-but-originally-still-manually-written text.