I'm not sure anyone who finds it difficult to write values to file and read from them later should be working on commercial software. I genuinely struggle to think of any single feature that could be more trivial than this is.

Later means you have to remember the flag and decide what later things it applies to.

....what? persistence is a solved problem.

i hate it when engineers do this song and dance "well actually it's really hard to do that" in order to justify the position that they already had before the conversation started. no it isn't, it literally isn't, it's just smoke and mirrors to justify your position.