The manifest file could be generated at build time. I believe it's more developer-friendly in the long run to be able to do configuration from in-band in the s

The manifest file could be generated at build time. I believe it's more developer-friendly in the long run to be able to do configuration from in-band in the same language / environment the application is running in vs out-of-band config. Spring config has become a good bit more manageable now that it's in doable Java (or Kotlin) rather than only XML. Both in-band and out of band could be offered, it wouldn't have to be a hard cutover anyway.