[throwaway290]

All plugins run arbitrary code and basically any and all of them gains access to your entire filesystem, home network, etc. Even if you properly containerize and firewall everything (99% of people won't) it can at very least read your possibly private source code. The stakes are not so small.

[PartiallyTyped]

I think I was misunderstood, or more likely did not convey the message correctly. Given a set of acceptable configurations that pass your litmus test, there's little - if any - reason to waste effort in deciding which to go with.

I assumed that the commenter had a relatively narrow list of what they deem acceptable, e.g. 2 or 3 or even 4 configurations.

The approach though is more general than this scenario and can be applied in almost every case with low stakes while absolving the person of the regret they might feel for their choice and reduce the time spent deciding in search for "perfection". The goal is to reduce regret and indecisiveness.

[throwaway290]

I see, I read it as "which do I choose from all the starter templates". I can understand the paralysis, trusting/vetting a whole template is trickier than if you start from blank slate and add plugins one by one as you go and develop intuitions for who are reliable plugin authors that usually don't break your editor etc. But a template is also tempting because more productivity faster, and going plugin by plugin with sometimes poor docs seems daunting.