> Imho excessive feature flag complexity is a symptom of management who are indecisive and mistrusted by the developers.

In my experience, engineers aren't using them to account for managerial dithering, they're doing it for safe deployments and experiments and rollouts and such. A product with millions of users can easily have a tens or even hundreds of active switches at any moment (I'm assuming a large engineering team behind said product), and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

However, as someone else noted here, you absolutely MUST delete and clean up your flags/gates/whatever when you've completed that effort. That part can be tricky because not everyone has the discipline to pay off tech debt.

Usually, a flag/gate should not live in code for more than a few months. If it does, it should have robust justification.

You need to be actively deleting them after the feature has gone live

This of course depends on the quantity and the depth of these feature flags. It’s ok to hard code few of them, maybe it’s not when it becomes a practice and you have tens of them. I think you would have a much easier life if there was a standardized, well documented, way to define them.