[jfkw]

Somewhat off-topic:

Fellow longtime Gentoo and recent Alpine user here. I haven't encountered undue conflict burden from configuration file updates. Some projects do churn whitespace etc, in configuration defaults files, which is unfortunate but not specific to any distro.

If an application supports a conf.d style override, I use that, containing only settings which differ from default.

Is there something inherent about Alpine packaging that handles local config differently?