This. Helm charts and renovate. The (frequently) included release notes help ease upgrades. If the charts / apps you deploy publish good release notes, you will get them in the renovate, easing your mind when upgrading.

It’s not perfect. Some don’t publish release notes, or the release notes only include the chart changes and not app changes. But if provided, there’s a link to the source to double check.

Also having something like ArgoCD that allows you to preview chart changes before syncing is very useful.

Same, you can enable local only API. Works great and they have public docs for it’s API. I also have an exporter with grafana graphs.