I evaluated Stow and tried Chezmoi for a while but settled on YADM. It’s the bare git repo idea with a little more sugar sprinkled on top. Perfect for my needs.
The main reason was because there invariably is always something slightly sensitive you don't want in a dotfile and the rest of the file is okay. Yadm uses third party tools to do jinja templating. The first one envtpl stopped being maintained, and the second one j2cli (both jinja2 templaters) aren't very well maintained either.
With chezmoi I just use the golang text/template templater. I know it will always be maintained. The integrated password manager functionality for chezmoi also works awesome too.
I did initially use stow, but symlinks is just bad. You end up with all sorts of problems with that I can't even remember. My whole dotfiles is 7MB, so if a copy is made from a "source tree" to my home dir that's okay.
Chezmoi also encouraged me to do things more deterministically based on hosts and reduce the number of "scripts" that I run significantly, which led to less bugs. I use the same set of dotfiles across a number of my systems.
i like yadm because it has simply no dependencies and can be installed literally anywhere on any archs (which is important to me)....
the yadm/awk templating system is good enough for me, it let you do some if host then output this or output that kind of things..... i never had a need for more.
