I'm not calling this is good with the persistence of the original author. I tell that it's one of the realities that we have, and instead of burning it with torches, why not build better conventions around it with better attitude and language?
Maybe we can try: "Instead of burying all config under environment variables, why not try doing it like this?", and slowly build something better, step by step. Nothing is inherently good or bad, but can be abused. So the abuse of environment variables as a shortcut needs to stop, one may say and I'd agree, and may also volunteer to help to build a better thing.
But, shunning it with anger and shouting "I'm the one who knows all right things!" sure creates backlash, like here.
All in all, I'm against the attitude, not the idea of improving a situation.
> Yes, some things are bad and are actively harmful.
It might be, but even your solution might not be right. Why the attitude?
> unstructured programming using gotos. Would you like to go back to that?
Did that on some older, limited hardware, and it was fun. It was not OK by today's standards, but I had to. I'll do it again if it's the only thing I can do to work on that particular hardware again.
> But perhaps you are not a programmer?
I just design algorithms and develop scientific applications which run on HPC clusters, nothing fancy.
> It's not a "de-facto standard", it's simply bad.
I didn't say it's good. I say it's a fact. I'm not disagreeing on its bad sides. I'm not OK with the attitude.