> And for the same reason, a child process that does the same won't inherit them in order to expose them.

Wait, this is the crux of why you think it’s more secure — but actually I see the reverse problem:

Dropping environmental variables is standard security practice, but dropping file access permissions is not. Most child processes read from the same set of files as the parents.

How would having files rather than ENVs make my container more secure, where we’re concerned with developers making mistakes (passing ENV vs passing file permissions)?

Similarly, the only proposed benefit of your idea is we don’t have them around post reading — but that’s true if you initialize a config object from ENV and then pass it around as well. (You ignored my point about how mistakes via logging happen.)