I fully agree. (Seeing how good Figment2 is for layered config in rust is wildly eye opening, has been a revelatory experience.)

Sometimes what we manage with config is itself processing pipelines. A tool like darktable has a series of processing steps that are run. Each of those has config, but the outer layer is itself a config of those inner configs. And the outer layer is a programmable pipeline; it's not that far apart from thinking of each user coming in and building their own http handler pipeline, making their own bespoke computational flow.

I guess my point is that computation itself is configuration. XSLT probably came closest to that sun. But we see similar lessons everywhere we look.