I share the same sentiment. Still looking for the holy grail but the best lead so far is using the combination of Bazel (excellent dependencies support), its rule for wrapping around good templating solutions (jsonnet, ksonnet, etc.) ; and some backend that integrates with infrastructure tooling to generate configurations to fetch into bazel.
What I want is a Maven for Kubernetes. With transitive dependencies, strong conventions, injection of parameters etc.
The templating stuff feels very...unstructured to me. Every Chart is slightly different.