God, I hate .env files

There is no reason anyone would ever use this instead of a regular config file.

What makes you believe that abruptly venting on HN will help?

They are right to say it though

Same here. What I hate most is the fact how tooling decides what should be hidden files and what not. Hiding important configuration files (also done by some SSGs) is a bad habit which makes it hard to explore a new project. At least such files should be refered to in some README.

I think the overuse of .env files is a side effect of the overuse of containers. Working with config files is much more convenient if you're running software normally, but if you're shipping an entire baseline OS along with your application, getting application-specific configuration data into the container becomes non-trivial. Environment variables provide a standardized way of making configuration data set outside the container available from within it.