Maybe jinja is well-suited to whatever its intended purpose is, but it's not well-suited for programmatically building markup. Using a dynamically typed scripting language to generate the markup at least has the benefit of allowing you to define appropriate semantics via functions ("give me a blob of YAML that represents a Kubernetes service with these parameters").

Sure, you can probably build your own concept of functions on top of Jinja, either by embedding them or building your own paradigm on top of Jinja's template inheritance, but it's a hack either way.

Well, I think it was originally designed with server-side html templating in mind. It works great for that purpose.

In the case of thread OP, that template is pretty messy, yes. In ansible, I would just create a custom module or action plugin in python to spit out whatever it is I need. I don't know how flexible salt is in this regard, but ansible is quite flexible.

For simple cases, jinja works great if you're just doing a find/replace type operation in yaml.