alt Hacker NewsRuntime evaluated feature flags can always be used for control plane levers and emergency handbrakes.
You just have to label them as such and prevent other teams from fiddling with them.
This is not an antipattern, it's just semantic hand-wringing.
My team managed critical systems in the online flow of billions of dollars of daily payment volume. We also wrote the feature flag system that the rest of the company used. Not only were we completely fine with feature flags as long-lived control plane levers, we heavily used the system that way ourselves.
You just have to clearly distinguish between ephemeral rollout flags (and clean them up or expire them) and the permanent control plane levers.
It's the exact same functionality for both sets of tools. Just different practices around the two usages.
I completely agree with your distinction and that is exactly what they mandated :)
I don't think that is what most people colloquially mean by "feature flags" though. Even most teams in Shopify abused "ephemeral" flags for long periods of time.
When they rolled out the mandate it was very annoying for my team because we had a lot of operational flags like you're describing that we needed to get exemptions for.