I 100% agree with everything you said and more. I spent a significant amount of time at my job arguing constantly with the entire engineering department that “Feature Flags” are not all the same thing and had to push back on efforts to mix them all up.

Examples:

Experiment flags for A/B testing

Permission checks at a user level

Product flags for feature gating by plan

Rollout flags to launch a new feature gradually

Configuration for an account/system/feature

The number of times I had to push against the “just put it behind hasFeatureFlag(user, flag)” is more than I can count at this point! I think it comes from a misunderstanding of the DRY principle, to be honest.