Is there any good information or insight someone can give on the difference between helm/v3 charts vs releases? They seem to do the same thing?

Helm.Charts are our initial implementation and doesn’t use Helm under the hood, which means that not all of Helm’s features are available. Helm.Release uses Helm as a library and does the exact same thing as Helm CLI When we use Helm directly, we lose access to transformations, but we can still use them with Chart

@quiet-wolf-18467 awesome thanks! So basically if I don't need to do transforms, its better to use the release?

Yeah 🙂

https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/kubernetes/how-to-guides/choosing-the-right-helm-resource-for-your-use-case/ covers this in more detail