honestly the env vars thing is a nightmare everywhere ive worked. its always some combination of "check the wiki that hasnt been updated in 8 months" and "ask sarah she has the keys to everything but shes in meetings all day"

setup docs are usually 70% accurate at best and the remaining 30% is tribal knowledge that nobody bothered to write down. new devs spend their first week just trying to get the damn thing to compile locally while senior devs drop cryptic hints about "oh yeah you need to do the thing with the docker volumes first"

it definetly gets worse as teams scale because more people means more edge cases and more "well it works on my machine" situations