I see where you are coming from but YAML anchors are definitely a great and powerful feature that deserves more attention. The other day I was refactoring a broken [1] k8s deployment based on a 3rd-party Helm chart and since I didn't have the time to migrate to a better chart, YAML anchors permitted me to easily reduce YAML duplication, with everything else (Helm, Kustomize, Flux, Kubernetes) completely unaware of anything. Just a standard YAML pattern.

[1] the broken part was due to an ex-coworker that cheated his way out of GitOps and left basically "fake code" committed, and modified by hand (with Lens) the deployment to make it work