As someone that develops native Kubernetes platforms: Providing the raw resources / manifests is almost the worst way of providing a user install. That works great as long as you never have a breaking change in your manifests or any kind of more complex upgrade.

Which brings me back to the initial question: Is this complexity and the external dependencies really needed? For a decently decomposed, highly scalable microservice architecture, maybe. For an Open Source (likely) single tenant management platform? Unlikely.

It highlights the problem of clashing requirements of different target user groups.