I don&#x27;t think the author ever said that you <i>shouldn&#x27;t</i> be able to configure an application. It&#x27;s more about proper default configs. Default configs are, incidentaly, an important part of the Unix philosophy of &quot;program that does one things well&quot;. Since it does one thing, it&#x27;s easier to guess which default configs should be shipped with it.<p>mkdir doesn&#x27;t, for example, explicitly demand permissions with which to create a folder (but you can do that: mkdir -m 777 dirname). less doesn&#x27;t require you to tell it whether to squeeze consecutive blank lines into one (but you can: less --squeeze-blank-lines).<p>It&#x27;s especially sad to see JS community forgo this principle, since it seems to embrace modularity (as in &quot;one module that does one thing well&quot;) so much. Babel 6 and Webpack could&#x27;ve been so much more fun to use if they came with sane configs out of the box.