I also get that we're arguing TIMTOWDI vs YAGNI. So, I want to take a beat to say that I think your take is absolutely valid, but I'm coming at this from a place where flexibility isn't my primary concern. I'm usually more interested in tools that will reliably save me time, and that's a quality typically in opposition to flexibility.

For me, any tool that requires or permits multiple configuration planes to get off the ground threatens to be a time sink and a tax for an already packed schedule. This complexity usually requires the operator to absorb a lot of nuance, quirks, and idioms, which is something that's difficult to do quickly. Troubleshooting also grows in scope , again due to the complex design and multiple ways to set things up. Meanwhile, the most inflexible tools in my stack cause me the least trouble due to their simplicity: there's one way to do it, and if it's a common mistake, the answer is easily searched online.

In practice, looking to the Traefik community for support required decoding everyone's different take with varying degrees of CLI and config file involvement, sometimes fragmented across entire discussion threads (not to mention the v1/v2 problem). It made for a very time consuming troubleshooting run - something that would have been avoided by a more simple design like other tools use.