I definitely think a lot of filesystem access is a code smell and probably not the right thing. That one causes me a lot of pain. But that’s largely because I work in games and you really need to use the Unity/Unreal/whatever asset management system instead of direct file system access.

I’ve got a small build system and the first thing it does is nuke PATH to empty. It’s glorious. No more grabbing random shit from a big blob with untracked dependencies that varies wildly by system!

I could easily live my entire life without environment variables. They’re just a fundamentally bad idea. Every program that foolishly uses environment variables can be replaced by a better program that takes a config file or arglist.