I think you may be overestimating how universal the lessons are. For more complicated configs, a common approach I see is that the “config file” is a program t

I think you may be overestimating how universal the lessons are. For more complicated configs, a common approach I see is that the “config file” is a program that generates the actual configuration data. If you just need to parse and introspect the config data, you fetch the build output and parse that, which does not have side effects.