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sincerely, why do this in the first place?

We were targetting configurations of Concourse for deploying software. We would have to do essentially the same deployment to multiple environments (dev, qa, staging, performance, prod) and Concourse doesn't provide a sufficiently rich configuration in its use of yaml. For a single app cut and paste is acceptable but once you get into multiple microservices, it becomes more efficient to do it this way.

Have you looked into Jsonnet/CUE/Dhall? They attempt to solve this problem, but give you an actual programming language instead. I've been using Jsonnet to successfully escape the 'yaml-templating-yaml' hell for years now.

But yeah, concourse configuration files are probably the worst YAML verbosity offenders, even worse than k8s manifests.

That sounds ridiculous.

Isn't that what Helm[1] is?

1 - https://helm.sh/