There are two similar things that can easily be conflated as they have some overlap, or can at least be used interchangeably in some cases. For one we have fea

There are two similar things that can easily be conflated as they have some overlap, or can at least be used interchangeably in some cases. For one we have feature flags, which should be used to disable features for certain environments, possibly AB testing and so on. You use those to reduce risk and friction in an ad-hoc fashion. They are meant to be simple booleans in code and short lived. Then we have feature scope, registration, authorization etc. which can be more wide reaching. They should be part of the data model and treated like everything else that is data driven. When we conflate the two, we get into trouble like you describe.