....what? persistence is a solved problem.

i hate it when engineers do this song and dance "well actually it's really hard to do that" in order to justify the position that they already had before the conversation started. no it isn't, it literally isn't, it's just smoke and mirrors to justify your position.

I know a guy who made a career out of advising management about this sort of foot dragging in software engineering. He is very wealthy.

Persistence of flags in the database is a solved problem.

Persistence of /people who work at the company who remember what the flags mean/ is not. What if you've made a promise to never show something, it has legal effect in some country, and a new PM in charge of a new feature uses the wrong flag?

I'm not sure anyone who finds it difficult to write values to file and read from them later should be working on commercial software. I genuinely struggle to think of any single feature that could be more trivial than this is.

Later means you have to remember the flag and decide what later things it applies to.

Who's you? Large companies have many different people working at them and designing a business process that can make it so there is a "you" to decide this may actually be impossible.