Yeah, I agree with this 100%
I think it could be improved if onboarding resources promoted plain data passing, and generators such as mix phx.new preferred init/2 over app env.
Some other minor additions, such as the ability to compute a value before compilation (so e.g. mix.env) and fetch it in a module could also help with the trickery which is System.cmd in mix scripts.
So in general I think that some education, pushes from popular generators, and a couple of minor additions from the language and mix could at least guide us all in a better direction.
