[nickjj]

I will admit, env files can be pretty "interesting" at times.

I've run into so many issues over the years around incompatibilities with how Docker Compose v1, Docker Compose v2 and Kubernetes tools process an .env file.

Often times it's related to having characters like $ in your value. Across many different examples sometimes you need to single quote the values, other times you need to use double quotes. Often times with Kubernetes tools you can't use quotes (certain ways of populating config maps and secrets from an env file have serious issues if you use quotes). Sometimes you need to escape certain characters, etc.. For a long time Docker Compose didn't allow `export MYVAR=coolvalue` because it had a space in it (it does now).

With that said, I can't realistically see dropping them for a config file because Docker Compose lets you use variable interpolation from an env file in a docker-compose.yml file which is awesome for reducing duplication. Having an env file that you can source in a shell script is also very convenient for ancillary commands that go with your project.