> Before there was Helm, I wrote my own tool and framework in Ruby (called Matsuri) to generate and manage manifests.
I've built these kinds of things too in Python (or Starlark). It's an improvement over YAML, but I often feel the pain of dynamic typing.
> The Ruby code can access anything Ruby to generate the manifests, so I have a Turing-complete language and I can use class inheritance, mixins, method overrides.
I actually don't want any of these things in a dynamic configuration language. I kind of just want something that can evaluate expressions (including functions, objects, arrays, scalars, and pattern matching). If it's Turing complete that's fine but unnecessary. I explicitly don't want I/O (not in your list) or inheritance, mixins, method overrides, etc--unnecessary complexity.
Dhall probably comes the closest, but it has a tragic syntax and I'm not a good enough salesman to persuade real software teams to learn it. I've also heard good things about Cue, but my experiences playing with it have only been painful (steep learning curve, don't really see the upsides).