The node equivalent, also very useful for engineering cost effective cloud environments, is called KEDA.

This is partially a tangent, but the whole managing of software infrastructure is a strange culture. There would of course be lots of better ways, but it's too bad the infrastructure side of the software industry lives partially in a parallel world and many of the lessons from elsewhere in the industry are not really widespread there (at least yet). Even banks seem intelligent and innovative compared to infrastructure management mainstream practices.

It's very error prone to describe a hierarchy of versioned software packages and configuration with shell scripts and yaml. Or use text files in git as a database. Or use the CI system as a bad substitute for a proper service (in order to do a simple thing, you must first create the world from scratch). And so on. Mainstream industry knows types, programming languages, relational databases, graphs and you name it, but those have not yet penetrated sufficiently into the infrastructure world. The understanding of the value of having types has been paid in sweat and blood when developing software and databases. Even a basic CRUD application with a basic SQL database will run rings around these Frankenstein monsters: in safety, speed, and extendability.

You can do JSON instead of YAML.

But no one does that because it is significantly uglier. So I guess we don't deserve sanity because we don't want our programs to be ugly?

I definitely prefer using kustomize over helm, where the mentioned interpolation takes place.

I do thank the advent of LLM's for making the task of tracing through 3 layers of YAML rendering indirection to find an actual bug in layers of insanity. They are surprisingly good at it. A purist might look at the system and be taken aback in horror, but pragmatically the crazy templating things that used to be pretty major in terms of maintainability have become a lot less problematic.

I don't even mind text interpolation in helm that much. Yes, it's horrific, but it really doesn't become problematic until you are having an external system render the text being sent to helm that might be processed again after the fact with Kustomize. Your text might hit literally 3-4 different YAML rendering pipelines before it finally hits your cluster. Insanity

Hashicorp had a similar idea to this configuration language you are mentioning. They named it HCL. We do know how that turned out, but maybe that was more questionable design rather than problems endemic to the approach.

I hate it so much. I got moved from a software role to a devops/platform engineering role after some contract shifts and it's miserable.

At least some years ago, I could cope by viewing it as "resume fodder" but that doesn't even matter anymore.