Comment by hnlmorg

You’re not missing anything. A lot of the problem is due to clunky generators.

But then those clunky generators do solve different problems too. Though I’m not going to debate that topic here right now, besides saying no solution is perfect and thus choose a tech stack is always a question of choosing which tradeoffs you want to make.

However on the topic of monolithic config files vs config directories, the latter does provide more options for how to manage your config. So even if you have a perfect system for yourself which lends itself better for monolithic files, that doesn’t mean that config directories don’t make life a lot easier for a considerable number of other systems configurations.