This is not a complete solution, but it seems to me an aspect of the solution is similar to the way the programming world over the past 5-10 years has been ackn

This is not a complete solution, but it seems to me an aspect of the solution is similar to the way the programming world over the past 5-10 years has been acknowledging that dependencies carry a certain cost with them that must be accounted for. Feature flags do too. If you account for them as just the in-the-moment costs of adding a flag for something, then you are grotesquely underestimating their costs. Personally I tend to resist them, for much this reason. I don't mean that I never use them and you can't find any in my code, but I resist them. They need to prove their utility to me before I add them, in much the same way I tend to make dependencies prove their worth beyond some momentary convenience before they are allowed in. There are times they leap that bar, but I think that generalized resistance has helped keep the code bases in better order than they otherwise would be. I've seen other teams who did not resist and they've developed a proliferation problem.