Actually, in this case the CI/CD software would helpfully mask anything that it knew was secret, in an attempt to make the output it displayed "safe". So to by

Actually, in this case the CI/CD software would helpfully mask anything that it knew was secret, in an attempt to make the output it displayed "safe". So to bypass that devs base64 encode the secrets (in this case the output from env) so that it is displayed and they can use it to debug that the right environment variables are set...