[beachy]

The word does indeed have initially negative connotations.

Perhaps it resonates more positively now to people who have had to work with "flexible" software such as Spring in the old days.

There were 100 ways to skin a cat with old Spring, and each way was a tortuous devil's brew of XML. Googling for any solution was a nightmare, exacerbated by hundreds of wannabe experts polluting the interwebs with their own strange takes.

Spring Boot was introduced in response as an opinionated approach. You can still skin the cat in 100 different ways, but at least you start with sensible defaults that someone far more knowledgeable than yourself had deemed to be good.

[MaxBarraclough]

That's a good point.

In programming, there's the idea that "The code shouldn't merely work, it should clearly work". If your configuration system becomes so complex that the same principle applies there, that's a bad sign.