> Then try thinking about potential ways of how all these things could interact to break a system.

This is where your advice goes south, IMHO. The sysadmin can't think of every possible way his system can get compromised -- they are not paid for that, black-hat hackers are.

Instead of collecting settings from a hundred places that must be set correctly for production, and inventing ways the system can get compromised, the safe settings could be provided in one place: ideally in the default settings so they are impossible to miss, or in a list, such as Django's deployment checklist [1].

Not saying that Postgres doesn't provide such a list, although googling for "checklist site:postgresql.org" only resulted in a mailing list reply [2], with some points not trivial to follow. Please comment below if you know an official one.

[1]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/howto/deployment/check... [2]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/D960CB61B694CF459DCFB4...