Sure, everyone has their own product and experience and it's fine to express it, but I don't get the usage of other decisions such as "no to services meshes", "no to helm" and many more.
You don't want to ideally reinvent the wheel for every workload you need (say you need a OIDC endpoint, an existing application): you are tempted to write everything from scratch by yourself, which is also fine, but the point is: why?
Many products deliver their own Helm package. And if you are sick of writing YAML, I would look for Terraform over Pulumi, for the reason that you use the same tool for bringing up Infrastructure and then workloads.
Kubernetes itself isn't easy to be used, in many cases you don't need it, but it might bring you nice things straight out of the box with less pain than other tooling (e.g. zero downtime deployments)