I'm guessing the syntax was the part the poster was complaining about when they complained about the "dev experience".

Dunno, there are other aspects of environment variables that deteriorate the dev experience. They're very conducive to spooky action at a distance, since they're silently being passed along from parent-process to child-process (except when they aren't).

They can cause a lot of annoying bugs, and sometimes it's hard to track down where they are coming from (especially when dealing with stuff running in containers).