Can kint be used to debug templates? Normally, I can use kint() in the place of dump() to debug my twig templates.  The theming manual agrees.

However, this doesn't work for me in Commerce 2.

In commerce-product.html.twig, I added

{{ kint(product) }}

And rebuilt the cache.

This caused me to be redirected to the "install" url, with the message "Drupal is already installed".

If I use {{ dump(product) }}, I get the expected output, but this array is enormous and hard to read so I want to use kint.  Is there something different about variables in Commerce?

If I use {{ kint(links) }} and the like in a template copied from core I see the kint output correctly.
The object/array is too big for your server resources to handle the default kint settings.
Edit modules/devel/kint/kint/config.default.php and set $_kintSettings['maxLevels'] to a lower number to reduce recursion and the memory needed for dumping variables. The default is 7, I have mine set to 4. If 4 still doesn't work for you, keep lowering the number.