I've deployed Kubernetes manifests with both Helm and Kustomize across half a dozen enterprise clients. The debate is tiresome. They solve different problems. Here's when each one actually makes sense.
ECK just went GA and we're running Elasticsearch on Kubernetes in production. It works. It's also the most operationally demanding thing in the entire cluster, and we spend more time babysitting it than everything else combined.
Everyone adopted Istio because everyone else was adopting Istio. Complex, resource-hungry, and solving problems most teams didn't have — it was the poster child for resume-driven development.
Service Fabric got a lot right — stateful services, the actor model, rolling upgrades with health checks. But it lost the ecosystem war to Kubernetes, and being technically superior wasn't enough to save it.
We were using FluxCD to reconcile Kubernetes state from git before anyone called it GitOps. The tooling was raw, the wins were real, and the company that coined the term went bankrupt. Make of that what you will.
The Databricks sales demo runs on a public workspace with default networking and an unlimited budget. Your enterprise Azure environment has none of those things. Here's what the gap actually looks like.