This is specious reasoning. When you add a feature flag, your goal is to purposely introduce version variations. How come is your explicit goal framed as this sneaky gotcha?

And let's be serious for a second. Do you see this "hockey stick growth" as an issue when you look at user settings?

> So cognitive overload is unavoidable after feature flags 5 as you have so many permutations.

Not really. Feature flags have a life cycle which is managed by release managers, and the goal is to always get rid of them asap. They are introduced to manage the risk of a rollout, and when the transition is over you pull the feature flags. Done.