It’s probably best to look at what the devops industry is embracing, environment variables are as secure as any of the alternatives but poor implementations will always introduce attack vectors. Secret management stores require you to authenticate, which requires you to store the credential for it somewhere - no matter what there’s no way to secure an insecure implementation of secrets access
That’s just as insecure lol, env vars are far better
Even worse, they’ll claim it was a bug
But the same could be said for almost anything, for instance a car’s engine is non-theoretical but could be otherwise done with a horse instead. I will still prefer the more advanced technology, but of course you do you
Just do a little bit of research into the fuel efficiency of various sized vehicles, the correlation is not direct and some larger vehicles get better gas mileage than smaller vehicles strictly due to efficiency. A small inefficient motor and a large efficient motor may yield the same mpg, but the large efficient motor is extracting more power from the same fuel source. And that’s not even getting into diesel versus gasoline…
Once you have lived through library dependency hell, you care
Google be in trouble then