The main alternative is to build packages with all such flags and disable the functionality you don't want at runtime. That's moderately less desirable because:

The main alternative is to build packages with all such flags and disable the functionality you don't want at runtime. That's moderately less desirable because: - Space/performance, to the extent that dead code elimination matters. - Not all packages support such runtime manipulation. - Doing so requires additional work from the installer to configure entrypoints or from the user post-installation to set up that config. There's something really clean and easy about being able to enable/disable a feature in one place.