Do you need Helm installed to use Helmcharts via Pulumi?

As far as I can remember me using it once, yes, because Pulumi uses it via

helm template

to “instantiate” the chart to YAML and convert that to Pulumi resources.

found a thread from feb where @billowy-army-68599 mentions it is no longer needed https://pulumi-community.slack.com/archives/C84L4E3N1/p1614122626153900

I don’t use it anymore. Everything is written in Pulumi code for us.

we use a lot of community helm charts which i do not want to maintain myself after conversion.

You are not required to have helm installed. The pulumi kubernetes provider uses the helm sdk/lib under the hood to template out the chart. https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-kubernetes/blob/master/provider/pkg/provider/invoke_helm_template.go