Rancher-longhorn vs longhorn

We installed longhorn from the longhorn helm repositories directly onto RKE2 clusters managed by Rancher… This was working well. However the version shown in the rancher UI was always saying to update to the rancher provided longhorn helm charts… Long story, after stupidly clicking to upgrade longhorn in the UI (on a test cluster), things got strange as suddenly longhorn-crd helm could not install cause it conflicted with “longhorn” crds and many other issues… After some faffing and updating crds manually we got the situation fixed.

My 1st question is really about what is the difference (or benefit) of using the rancher provided helm packages over the longhorn helm - is it purely cosmetic and has better UI integration with Rancher?

My 2nd question would be how to manage rancher provided helm charts outside of rancher (in the gitops world for example). We dont really want to click click too much in our clusters but prefer to have all configured in code.

Thanks for any insights here.