Creating the YAML file is critical for being able to redeploy and track what is happening. If you don't want to create YAML then you have limited options. You could execute the imperative command from Azure DevOps by using a kubectl task.

kubectl create deployment <name> --image=<image>.azureacr.io

Or you can use the Kubernetes provider for Terraform to avoid creating YAML directly.

Follow up:

So if you are familiar with the Kubernetes imperative commands you can use that to generate your YAML by using the --dry-run and --output options. Like so:

kubectl create deployment <name> --image=<image>.azureacr.io --dry-run --output yaml > example.yaml

That would produce something like looks like this which you can use to bootstrap creating your manifest file.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: null
  labels:
    app: example
  name: example
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: example
  strategy: {}
  template:
    metadata:
      creationTimestamp: null
      labels:
        app: example
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: nginx
        name: nginx
        resources: {}
status: {}

Now you can pull that repo or an artifact that contains that manifest into your Azure DevOps Release Pipeline and add the "Deploy to Kubernetes Cluster" task.

This should get you pretty close to completing a pipeline.