.env is self sustaining at this point. The functionality described in the post exists to help move people off of it. It’ll have a better chance of dying when fewer people use it and that starts with making it easy to move away from it.

How exactly changing a default that users rely on is going to make it easy to move away from it?

Instead of migrating to dotenv-ng, these users could be putting effort into migrating away from .env files entirely.

edit: I understand SecretSpec needs to parse .env files exactly like Node.js’s dotenv library, which doesn’t support interpolation, to make it easier for these projects to use SecretSpec.

I’m saying making this a standalone library is bad. Rust projects will pick this up and use it instead of SecretSpec, and users of the unmaintained Rust crate will migrate to it.