The PostgreSQL community debates ALTER SYSTEM

This is an improvement for anywhere that uses configuration management, irrespective of whether containers are in use. I always make a best reasonable effort to ensure that daemons have no way to write to their own configuration. I don't want anybody on my team to get stuck with troubleshooting why a recently-replaced server doesn't behave the same way as the pre-replacement server. Changes made outside of configuration management tend to cause problems long after the changes were made, when nobody can remember the details.

Being able to disable use of postgresql.auto.conf entirely would be even better.