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Never seen this problem in the wild. Seems like it would be a very rare issue limited to very large configs with conflicting names.

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You've never seen software that will use a default value, instead of refusing to operate, when a particular environment variable isn't present in the environment?

No I’ve never seen software that broke because someone added a config key.

I was deploying some dotnet app and it broke because the devs baked a config key into the image that was otherwise unset, which enabled it trying to start a SSL endpoint without a cert, thus breaking the app.

Are you talking about altering environment variables in a system, or altering software to read different environment variables? I read jt2190 as talking about the former.

I don’t use env variables for this and many other reasons. They seem like a spectacularly bad idea for config, as the op noted.

I’m talking about altering a config which you control - adding to a config is pretty risk free if it is your program, altering a config of course is not.

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