Eugen isn’t the Fediverse. At least for the Twitter Exodus most Masto instances used a fork that allowed for longer posts than Eugen liked. There’s 0 reason to care about what he’s doing, he can’t control the network.

And you still couldn’t be sure, could be parsed the other way around for historic reasons.
Just reading the source code (if possible ofc) is imho easier than reading.

You still don’t know which location is preffered and how get they get merged. In my experience, digging into the source is the most straighforward. But my usual problem is more that the config option doesn’t do at all what the documentation says it does.

The *nix equivalent is the lsof command. This doesn’t help you finding out in which hierarchy config files are parsed when the program accesses multiple ones, which is often the case.

What’s imho worse is how often config options or command flags don’t actually do at all what’s described in the manpage. I then have to dig into the source code once again and since you have to read through the whole behaviour it takes much longer than just looking up where the program tries to read config files.

Please - if you find such wrong docs in Open source software, submit a fix to the doc. It’s as important as normal bugfixes.