I see this as the EU moving pieces to influence the UK people to revert brexit in a generation (Bregret? Breback?). It benefits the demographic that was already against brexit and keeps the idea od Europe in their minds.
I doubt is for cheap labor. I work in London and in a team of 20 we have a single British, and the few in the company tend to have an easier path for leadership, so why leave? That has been similar in all my previous jobs.
Best I have used is Flux with helmrelease objects and kustomize. Only lacking some UI to get flux events and logs together. I guess that Argocd can do the same with application onjects using charts as source but haven’t tested it yet
But managing both k8s external components (external-dns, external-secrests, CSI, etc etc) and your own apps with kustomizable charts makes so much more sense than having thousand of manifests that I would recommend everyone to try.
If I could be bothered to sit and write down a distilled version of my last decade at work it would be something very similar. Any junior SRE can benefit from this.
Congratulations!