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improvement: implement ArgoCD Hydrator for manifest pre-rendering #1575

Description

@ixxeL2097

Context

ArgoCD's Manifest Hydrator (introduced as an experimental feature in ArgoCD 2.13+) allows pre-rendering Helm/Kustomize manifests into plain YAML and committing them back to Git, enabling fully GitOps-auditable manifests and faster sync (no server-side rendering).

Goal

Evaluate and implement the ArgoCD Hydrator in the genmachine cluster to:

  • Pre-render all ApplicationSet-managed Helm charts into hydrated manifests stored in Git
  • Make the rendered YAML auditable and diffable in PRs (Renovate diff comments become exact k8s manifests, not values changes)
  • Reduce ArgoCD control-plane load (no Helm rendering at sync time)
  • Enable argocd app diff without needing cluster access

Tasks

  • Enable the Hydrator feature gate in the ArgoCD Helm values (gitops/bootstrap/genmachine/)
  • Configure a HydrationController or equivalent manifest hydration pipeline
  • Define the target branch/path where hydrated manifests are committed (e.g. hydrated/ or a dedicated branch)
  • Update ApplicationSets to source from hydrated manifests path
  • Validate that Renovate PRs show the actual rendered diff (not just values changes)
  • Document the hydration flow in docs/

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